“Single motherhood, by contrast, directly harms children, occurs at a rate of about 1.5 million a year and has a causal relationship to criminal behavior, substance abuse, juvenile delinquency, sexual victimization and almost every other social disorder. “
Ann nails it again.
But I only give my bullseye award out to board posters ;)
The claim of a “causal relationship” is a crock. Studies that come up with statisticis about the children of single mothers lump them all together, so that the outcomes for children of the majority of single mothers — poor, uneducated, on welfare, even before they had any children — are implied to show a statistical “chance” of the same outcomes for children of any sort of single mother. The studies of children who were raised in mother-only households due the husband-father’s death before or shortly after the child’s birth, show outcomes bearing no resemblance to those in the generalized “single mothers” studies.
The primary *cause* of the poor outcomes is the combination of poverty, lack of education, and the propensity for poor judgement which results in thinking it’s a great idea to have babies while poor, uneducated, and lacking a financially stable and reasonably well-educated co-parent. The statistical *correlation* between single mothers and poor outcomes for their children is due to the statistical correlation between possessing those causative factors and being a single mother.
If Ann got pregnant by accident and ended up having the baby and raising it by herself, there is virtually zero chance that the child would grow up to exhibit “criminal behavior, substance abuse, juvenile delinquency, sexual victimization and almost every other social disorder.” Eating disorder would be much more likely . . .