Julie DelegalGeorge Will is right. Daniel Moynihan was right. And former Vice President Dan Quayle was at least half-right. The breakdown of the family unit in our society is a harbinger of national disaster.
To say it out loud is not to blame the “victims,” i.e., the children who are born outside of marriage, or the women who raise their babies alone. To utter it does not diminish my own love for the single-moms-with-babies in my life. To speak of it is not racism or classism or any other “ism” in which the dominant culture oppresses a minority lifestyle choice. The dominant culture happens to be right. Young, single-mother homes are not ideal. The proof is in the poverty.
The dominant culture, by the way, is quickly becoming smaller and less dominant, given birthrate trends. In 2009, 59 percent of babies born to mothers of all ages were born into marital homes, according to Jason DeParle and Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times. But when they looked at children born to mothers under age 30, they found that more than half of these births occurred outside of marriage.
Here’s how, over the course of decades, both liberals and conservatives have unwittingly sanctioned out-of-wedlock births.
Americans of all political stripes fundamentally value equality under the law and equal opportunity for everyone. The life of a child born out of wedlock is no less worthy than one born within marriage. Both children deserve food, shelter, education and health care regardless of the circumstances of their birth.
But to advocate for resources for mothers and children, and to make sure that children born without dads in the home don’t feel like second-class citizens, politicians on the left have gone out of their way to avoid stigmatizing unwed mothers and their babies.
In doing so, they’ve sanctioned fatherless families as a choice that women are entitled to make. The left’s propagation of “diverse family structures” doesn’t let the right off the hook, though, as we’ll see in a moment.
This discussion is not about mature women or men who make informed choices about creating offspring, or adopting them.
On this, Dan Quayle and I will continue to disagree. The fictional TV character Quayle so famously disparaged back in 1992 for creating a single-mother household was fully equipped to raise her fictional baby. Unfortunately, the TV program went overboard, using the plotline to showcase “diversity” in families and promote the idea of the dispensable dad.
So, are single-parent households OK only if the parent is a rich professional? To the extent that we don’t want increased numbers of children being raised in poverty, the answer is yes. But this is not a discussion about preventing poor moms and dads from having children. Rather, it’s about adding one more fact in the talk about the “facts of life.”
The fact is, raising a baby out of wedlock usually sentences both mom and child to long-term financial grind. The struggle could continue throughout the child’s lifetime, according to researcher W. Bradford Wilcox, who found that children raised in marital families were 44 percent more likely to graduate from college.
This discussion is also about acknowledging that while young women procreate with men they won’t marry because they’re looking for better “marriage material,” they’re ignoring the fact that many men become better marriage material only after they’re married. Studies say that marriage is positively related to male earning potential.
I tell my own children: One, don’t have sex before marriage; but, two, if you do, use birth control and disease prevention; and, three, don’t do it with anyone you can’t see yourself marrying.
Enter plan four: what happens if you break rule one, and stupidly ignore rules two and three, inadvertently creating another human being?
This is where conservatism, specifically the pro-life movement, has encouraged the creation of out-of-wedlock families. First, young women are slut-shamed out of even thinking about birth control. Second, young women are discouraged or prevented from having abortions.
The life of the unborn takes precedence over the pregnant woman’s own life. Further, she is praised because at least she didn’t have an abortion. Visible unmarried pregnancy becomes a badge of honor in the eyes of the pro-life advocates. Dads, again, are relegated to the sidelines.
Pregnancy comes with lots of attention and shopping. But caring for a baby is hard work. Parenthood entails a unique form of self-deprivation that some of us simply aren’t ready to lovingly embrace, or re-embrace, in the case of the grandparents who selflessly alter their lives for their unmarried daughters and grandbabies.
Sometimes adoption enters the conversation prior to birth. Sometimes adoption comes later when children in intolerable circumstances enter the foster-care system.
Adoption doesn’t get talked about enough, partly because it throws water on the political flames that both the pro-choice and pro-life crowds love to fan.
For the pro-choice crowd, the mother’s life takes precedence; for the pro-life crowd, the unborn’s life is more important. The third way, adoption, might be a way to honor, value, and support both lives equally.
