All who can read research know that having babies out of wedlock is dangerous to the babies, instant poverty to the mothers and long term destruction to the nation that promotes it. We have known this for mnany years but scholars are afraid to say it and media types get mean and nasty if we gring it up.
Over thirty years ago a famous and wise Democrat Senaror from New York read the statistics about the fact that about 30% of all Black babieswere being born out of wedlocl and he predicted that this spelled disaster for all of us but especially for African American families. He was excoriated and attacked as a racist and he promply stopped telling the truth.
Dan Quayle said that the TV character Murphy Brown was setting a bad example by having a baby but not getting married. The media and left wing zealots called him a Nazi and a man who hated single mothers.
Then, in the early Eighties a new disease sprang up and began killing thousands of homosexual men. Doctors called it HIV and AIDs and called for measures to test active gay men and the uproar was overwhelming. One could not even admit it was a disease that was particularly common among gay men. Thousands more died as a result.
New research reveals that the number of unwed mothers is increasing and has reached 37% of all births in America. Most are paid by Medicade and will go immediately onto welfare.
They will very likely be forced to live in perpetual poverty without the presence of a male in the home for the rest of their lives. Not having a father in the home causes brain damage, violence and long term addictions and other health problems.
Here is what the Wall Street Journal reports about this issue.
Princeton Prof. Sara McLanahan directs the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which was begun to track 5,000 single mothers who gave birth between 1998 and 2000. Many were romantically involved when the study began, and many spoke approvingly of marriage. Several years on, however, few are wed, and their children often have experienced the stress of churning relationships. More and more, Ms. McLanahan says, "you're beginning to see these households composed of a mother and three children and three different ex-partners . . . and this is turning into a situation where children are being raised in very unstable families."
As social scientists and others look for solutions, some begin with the premise that single motherhood is a reality, so we must adjust to it with various services, such as programs designed to help mothers get better jobs. Government-funded initiatives also include couples counseling for unmarrieds, so that these parents at least function better as a team.
Missing in almost all these approaches is what the Manhattan's Institute's Kay Hymowitz refers to as "the M-word." She told us that while high-school girls may accept advice to finish their education before having children, the "wait until" message doesn't include marriage.
Perhaps that's because no one wants to sound judgmental or stigmatize single women who choose to have children. But to be truly fair--and caring--would first require telling the truth. In her new book, "Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age," Ms. Hymowitz documents how, by refusing to emphasize the link between marriage and successful child raising, "we have created a new demographic, which is the poor, working, single mother.
We must speak up now for the benefit of these children and their mothers.
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