Posted on 05/15/2009 6:11:14 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The other day I chatted with a pregnant gal at the hair salon. She was about 20, sweet, pretty, and demure. Because I am always doing sociological fieldwork, I asked my hairdresser if the girl was married. No. But she has a fiancé. As always in these situations, you just want to grab these young people by the lapels and say “Get to the altar! It’s critical for your child.” I didn’t of course — because, while I am a zealot for marriage, I’m not yet prepared to become a public nuisance.
I thought of that young lady again this morning when I read of the latest report from the National Center for Health Statistics. It seems that the rate at which unmarried women are having babies in America jumped dramatically in the past seven years. “In 2007, there were 1,714,643 babies born to unmarried women, an increase of 4% from 2006, and 26% higher than the number in 2002 (1,365,966),” the NCHS reports. Forty percent of births in America are now to unwed mothers. Rates are highest among Hispanic women (like the one at the salon).
Though we had a vigorous national discussion about unwed childbearing back in the 1990s — Murphy Brown followed by “Dan Quayle Was Right” by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead in The Atlantic a few years later — our current preoccupation with gay marriage has distracted us. The issue of greater importance is the degree to which heterosexual men and women are choosing to become parents while unmarried. “If you see 10 babies in the room,” Stephanie Ventura of the NCHS told the Washington Post, “four of them were born to women who are not married.”
And while popular culture and supermarket checkout mags might give you the impression that wealthy, successful women are leading the way on single parenting, celebrities actually obscure the reality. Movie stars and pop singers do often abjure marriage, but most successful women do not. In fact, as Kay Hymowitz limned in her 2006 book, Marriage and Caste in America, what we really have in this country is a caste system. At the top are the college graduates who nearly always get married before becoming pregnant. At the bottom are poor women of all races and backgrounds who routinely have babies before they marry (if they ever marry). “As of 2000,” Hymowitz wrote “only about 10 percent of mothers with 16 or more years of education — that is, with a college degree or higher — were living without husbands. Compare that with 36 percent of mothers who have between 9 and 14 years of education.” And the new NCHS data suggest that the numbers have only gotten worse since 2000. The life prospects for children born into intact families are so dramatically different from those born into single-parent homes that it would seem a gross injustice if it resulted from anything other than the free choice of parents. Actually, it is a gross injustice to the children — even if it is perpetrated by their parents.
By the age of 12, 78 percent of children living in non-married households have experienced one or more years of poverty. For children in intact families, the figure is 18 percent. Babies born to unwed moms are more likely to be premature, to be low birthweight, and to suffer other pathologies. Children who are raised in non-marital households have poorer school performance, more trouble with the law, more mental and emotional disturbances, more poverty, suffer more physical and sexual abuse, and are more likely to become unwed parents themselves. Here’s Hymowitz again: “Children of single mothers have lower grades and educational attainment than kids who grow up with married parents, even after controlling for race, family background, and IQ.”
Princeton sociologist Sarah McLanahan, among others, has speculated about why less-educated young women do not wait for marriage. Perhaps they invest marriage with excessively lofty expectations for complete personal happiness and fulfillment? One of the unwed moms interviewed by the Post explained her decision not to marry the father of her three-year-old this way “He’s a good dad and a good person, but he’s just not right for me.” Another offered that “I didn’t want to pick the wrong person just to have a kid, so I just decided to go ahead and do it and work on the relationship later.”
Young women, especially poorly educated ones, have gotten the idea that marriage is all about them — about their romantic hopes. In fact, while marriage often does deliver on the promise of happiness for adults, it is only secondarily about adult happiness. It is primarily about safety and security for children. The old stigma against illegitimacy was harsh and led to its own kind of suffering. But it prevented narcissistic young people from impairing the lives of their children on a grand scale.
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— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist.
All I have to say is, with Planned Parenthood handing out free contraception left and right and/or how it takes about 10 seconds to put on a condom....well, sorry...I forgot, people don’t have to be responsible anymore.
How irresponsible of me to bring it up. :)
“The life prospects for children born into intact families are so dramatically different from those born into single-parent homes that it would seem a gross injustice if it resulted from anything other than the free choice of parents. Actually, it is a gross injustice to the children — even if it is perpetrated by their parents.”
Terrific article. Thanks for posting. :)
Why get married when Uncle Sam and his hapless minions will pay to take care of your kid. No guy could compete with that.
I love Mona but the pro-life movement has become pro-single-Mom movement , example ? GWB single Mom tax credits. Also Powerful/Secret Family courts (for breaking up families, rewarding Mom’s for births) is another.
The disintegration of the family unit started with LBJs “Great Society” and was finished off by The Pill. Minorities this time were struck harder. Free and easy no committal sex sounded so great back then. But actions have consequences.
"Somebody else" will pay to raise the kid.
The destruction of the family is the goal of the left, and the one they are ultimately working for...
It started with Antonio Gramsci in the 1920s. It was imported to the US with the Frankfurt School of German Marxists in the 1930s, who later brought us a transformation in psychotherapy (Maslow), education (Marcuse), and feminism (Fromm).
The destruction of the American family was done deliberately, because it leaves the almighty state to raise the children, by default.
And it’s so simply resolved: stop the money.
LBJ made it government policy and this is when it became widespread. Earlier it was shameful to have an out of wedlock child not a career. LBJ provided the means for this to fuel itself into the whirlwind of bastardy we have today.
So very true.
I have a sister with 4 kids, 4 different “babydaddies”. It drives me absolutely crazy.
I come from a broken family and never want to live like that as an adult.
I am not wealthy in terms of money, but I have 7 kids and a wife of over 15 years.
The records of over 200 children molested in the process remain sealed to this day.
Another milestone was the transformation of divorce laws. Yet a third was the dissolution of churches as the principal source of social welfare. LBJ's Great Society was a symptom as much as a cause.
That is the answer, alright... but the leftists would cry out “mean spirited”, “racist”, etc...
And those with soft brains would cave.
This is the responsibility of the Church. And the gov’t intentionally pushed the church out of this role.
If you have seven kids you need to update your homepage.
Hispanic Family Values? Runaway illegitimacy is creating a new U.S. underclass.
"Unless the life chances of children raised by single mothers suddenly improve, the explosive growth of the U.S. Hispanic population over the next couple of decades does not bode well for American social stability. Hispanic immigrants bring near–Third World levels of fertility to America, coupled with what were once thought to be First World levels of illegitimacy. (In fact, family breakdown is higher in many Hispanic countries than here.) Nearly half of the children born to Hispanic mothers in the U.S. are born out of wedlock, a proportion that has been increasing rapidly with no signs of slowing down. Given what psychologists and sociologists now know about the much higher likelihood of social pathology among those who grow up in single-mother households, the Hispanic baby boom is certain to produce more juvenile delinquents, more school failure, more welfare use, and more teen pregnancy in the future."
The dimensions of the Hispanic baby boom are startling. The Hispanic birthrate is twice as high as that of the rest of the American population. That high fertility rate—even more than unbounded levels of immigration—will fuel the rapid Hispanic population boom in the coming decades. By 2050, the Latino population will have tripled, the Census Bureau projects. One in four Americans will be Hispanic by mid-century, twice the current ratio. In states such as California and Texas, Hispanics will be in the clear majority. Nationally, whites will drop from near 70 percent of the total population in 2000 to just half by 2050. Hispanics will account for 46 percent of the nation’s added population over the next two decades, the Pew Hispanic Center reports.
But it’s the fertility surge among unwed Hispanics that should worry policymakers. Hispanic women have the highest unmarried birthrate in the country—over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly one and a half times that of black women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Every 1,000 unmarried Hispanic women bore 92 children in 2003 (the latest year for which data exist), compared with 28 children for every 1,000 unmarried white women, 22 for every 1,000 unmarried Asian women, and 66 for every 1,000 unmarried black women. Forty-five percent of all Hispanic births occur outside of marriage, compared with 24 percent of white births and 15 percent of Asian births. Only the percentage of black out-of-wedlock births—68 percent—exceeds the Hispanic rate. But the black population is not going to triple over the next few decades.
In the past, women were more reluctant to have sex before marriage (note that I'm not saying it didn't happen, just that they were more reluctant). Guys who wanted to get female companionship needed to get married in order to obtain it.
Now we have sex being easier to get, and family court making marriage much less attractive to guys. Meanwhile, it has become easier for a woman to be a single mom.
At my office, a pretty, intelligent young woman of twenty accidentally got pregnant. She is a white girl, from a nice middle-class, basically untroubled family that had had hopes for her, and she was devastated.
Several months later she was back at the office to show off her new baby. She couldn’t have been happier. You see, state, federal, and local programs had set her up with a nice apartment and all the financial support she and the baby could use. She was living quite a comfortable lifestyle. When we asked if she was planning to come back to work, she said, “Oh, no! I’m just going to get pregnant again as fast as possible.” She didn’t have to work, and if she had another baby or two she would truly be on easy street. Of course, none of her lovely babies will grow up with a father in the house, but she cares nothing about that. Perhaps she thinks she’ll find them a stepfather or step-babydaddy.
What possible motivation would a young woman with no strong career ambitions or real talent have to work hard and go to college when she can have a perfectly nice lifestyle? We have made a grave mistake by rewarding dysfunctional behavior like this.
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