Mary Cheney's Pregnancy Affects Us All

Townhall ^ | December 7, 2006 | Janice Shaw Crouse PhD, Concerned Women for America

[rakovskii]

Mary Cheney’s pregnancy poses problems not just for her child, but also for all Americans. Her action repudiates traditional values and sets an appalling example for young people at a time when father absence is the most pressing social problem facing the nation. With 37 percent of American children born to fatherless families, Mary Cheney is contributing to a trend that is detrimental to all Americans who will live with the ramifications of millions of children whose anger and frustration at not knowing their father will be felt in the public schools and communities of our nation.

Mary Cheney is among that burgeoning group of adult women over age 20 that are driving the trend of women who don’t want a man in the picture, but want to have a baby. These older women are pushing out-of-wedlock birth statistics higher and higher. At a time when teen births and teen abortions are declining dramatically, older women are having more un-wed births and more abortions, including repeat abortions (indicating that they are using abortion as birth control).

Well-educated, professional Mary Cheney is flying in the face of the accumulated wisdom of the top experts who agree that the very best family structure for a child’s well-being is a married mom and dad family. Her child will have all the material advantages it will need, but it will still encounter the emotional devastation common to children without fathers.

One Georgia high school principal reported, “We have too many young men and women from single-mother families that don’t have the role models at home to teach them how to deal with adversity and handle responsibility. They’ve seen their mom work 60 hours a week just to put food on the table; they end up fending for themselves.”

When fatherless children get to be teens, the girls tend to start looking for love in all the wrong places and the boys tend to find as their role model the bad-boy celebrities of MTV, NFL and NBA.

As they grow older, fatherless children tend to have trouble dealing with male authority figures. Too often children in single-mother households end up angry at their absent fathers and resentful of the mother who has had to be a father figure, too. Typically, the boys who have a love-hate relationship with their mother end up hating all women. Numerous of them look for vulnerable women where they can act out their anger and be in control.

Mary Cheney’s action sets an example that is detrimental for mothers with less financial resources who will start down an irrevocable path into poverty that tends to be generational –– children in households without a father tend to themselves have unwed births later in life. Experts from both the left and the right cite a disastrous litany of negative outcomes that are predictable when a child grows up in a fatherless family. Such children tend to get involved in drugs, alcohol abuse, and delinquency; they tend to drop out of school and have teen pregnancies. An assistant principal in a Junior High School said that many of the behavioral problems that teachers face in the classroom stem from households without a father’s influence.

Mary’s pregnancy is an “in-your-face” action countering the Bush Administration’s pro-family, pro-marriage and pro-life policies. She continues to repudiate the work to which her father has devoted his life. Mary has repeatedly said that “studies” show that children only need a loving home. Her statement is incomplete because the experts agree that for the well-being of children, they desperately need a married father and a mother.

All those people who talk about doing what is best “for our children” need to get back to the basics: children need a married mom and dad. Children can do without a lot of the trimmings of childhood, but nothing can replace a home where the mother and dad love each other enough to commit for a lifetime and are absolutely crazy about their kids –– enough to be willing to sacrifice their own needs to see that their children get the very best.

Janice Shaw Crouse, Ph.D., Senior Fellow at the Beverly LaHaye Institute, a culturally conservative think tank for Concerned Women for America, is a recognized authority on domestic issues, the United Nations, cultural and women’s concerns.

[Mrs. Don-o]

It does raise interesting questions about how Mary Cheney was raised, doesn't it?

[Mrs. Don-o]

Right. Here's to gay couples' Right to Privacy.

[Mrs. Don-o]

The problem isn't just the decision to have your lesbian lover adopt your child. The bigger problem is deliberately conceiving a child via a laboratory procedure and a commercial transaction, for the purpose of deliberately depriving the child of a father.

So, fathers are optional? Why is a child's right to a father optional? Why is it that adults' preferences trump children's rights, every time?

Not that Mary and Heather won't treat their little one well, from a care-and-feeding point of view. But this is a child being acquired as a lovable little critter without a full set of rights --- without a patrimony --- from the git-go.

[oceanview]

the MSM/left runs with this story - because (as you can see from many of the posts here), they know how some of the values voters on the right will react. they want the right to be seen as demonizing Mary Cheney, it drives more independents away.

anyone on this thread who doesn't believe me - just ask Jim Talent. Limbaugh's antics vis-a-vis Michael J Fox, likely cost us that seat.

We have to learn not to personalize this debate by attacking specific individuals, we can win on the values issues when presented in the abstract - but not if we go out there saying "Mary Cheney is bad", or "no lesbians can have babies". Those are losing approaches.

[MassachusettsGOP]

Why is it that adults' preferences trump children's rights, every time?

Because only adults are voters.

[Mrs. Don-o]

If having children per se were the fundamental right of every person, no matter how you go about it, then children would be reduced to commodities: property to be bought, sold, traded, leased, patented, produced, and distributed. Low-income single men would have a right to have childbearng concubines provided by the state. Single women who can't find or don't want a normal relationship with a an, would have a right to subsidized insemination.

But having children is not, in an absolute sense, a right: what you DO have a right to, is to marry a person with whom you can have an honest go at natural procreation.

Sometimes because of the vagaries of chance or disease, irresponsibility or tragedy, children are deprived of a natural father or mother. In those cases, adoption is a very good option to respond to the needs of the child. But no child shold be deliberately deprived of a father by design, simply to provide for the preferences of powerful adults.

[Diana in Wisconsin]

"...we can win on the values issues when presented in the abstract..."

Keep saying that. Loudly and often!

Conservativism ALWAYS wins on IDEAS. You're right that we can't let it get personal. We can in our own homes, of course, but as a national platform for the GOP? It's political suicide.

However...the 'Rats can demonize any one of us for any old reason and get away with it. It sucks, but that's how the game seems to be played these days. *SHRUG*

I have no problem being held to a higher standard. Wish our CongressCritters felt the same way. :(

[MEGoody]

This country was so much better when degeneracy was called degeneracy.

Yep.

[MEGoody]

of all the God given rights bestowed upon a woman, that's a biggie.

Sure is. Too bad these two didn't decide to do things God's way. Ah, but they will stand before Him some day, as we all will.

[Howlin]

as we all will.

You better hope you're right in your thinking that God is on your side.

[MEGoody]

You do realize any judge can find a psychiatrist who will call homophobia a mental disorder.

You can also find psychiatrists who call homosexuality a mental disorder. What's your point?

[MEGoody]

You better hope you're right in your thinking that God is on your side.

If by 'my side' you mean knowing that same gender sex is a sin, He is. He told us in His word.

[oceanview]

and you want government to enforce, through laws, all of your ideas? how is the goivernment going to stop a single woman from getting pregnant is she wants to, with a law making her a criminal? same with a lesbian?

[Hildy]

WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? Are you insane?

[veronica]

You have FReepmail.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Sigrid Undset's short novel, Jenny, which was written in 1911, includes an episode where the main character, an artist, conceives a child with a lover totally unsuitable for marriage, and decides not to tell him she's pregnant but just to go off and have the baby on her own. I'm sure there have been women who have done this throughout history: wanted a baby, but did not want a man.

In a way, the sexual "orientation" of the woman is not the main point. The main point is that in most of the history of civilization this would be seen as a child being born into a broken situation.

I think that what causes consternation now, is that this is seen more and more as an unimpeachable lifestyle option: first with radical groups in the early 70's like the Boston Women's Health Collective, then as a commonplace thing on the Left Coast (the Berzerkeley Inseminator Baby Boom), and now --- this is the kicker --- among the conservative Republicans.

It creates the impression that nobody can be relied upon to even acknowledge that this is a broken situation, that children are being brought into existence fatherless by plan and by design; that the child is going to be intentionally deprived of the male line --- a dad --- a patrimony--- because the grown-ups want it that way.

[marajade]

" ... you mean knowing that same gender sex is a sin..."

This thread is about Ms. Cheney having a child. I'm just not getting how you are connecting the two.

[Howlin]

Oh, we could never understand how the moral absolutists' minds work, marajade.

[Howlin]

If that Freepmail is explaing what the hell is going on on these threads, send it to me, too. :-)

[marajade]

Its always someone else's sin with them instead of their own. And their superior attitude that they are just "better" than everybody else because of what they think they "believe".