The New York Times calls unwed motherhood “the new normal,” at least for women under 30. Over at the Georgia Family Council site, I disagree. The Times reporters attempt a Grey Lady version of evenhandedness, but following Rachel Sheffield, I don’t see how we can do anything but deprecate and deplore the trendlines in unwed motherhood. This is bad for children, and the Planned Parenthood bag of tricks shouldn’t be the only, or even the preferred, solution.
David Brooks suggests that part of the answer is what he calls “bourgeois paternalism.” It’s hard to disagree with him, at least on that level of generality. But “bourgeois” can’t mean what he seems to say it means here.
UPDATE: Katie Roiphe has a very negative reaction to the Times‘s “evenhandedness.
Conservatives will no doubt be elaborately hysterical over the breakdown of morals among the women of Lorain, but they will be missing the major point, which is that however one feels about it, the facts of American family life no longer match its prevailing fantasies. For those who have associated single motherhood with the poor and uneducated, and increasingly, with the urban very-educated (see the New York Times piece, the same day, on Casey Greenfield) they now have to confront the changing demographics of the vast American middle. No matter how one sees this development, and as a single mother myself I have my own views, one has to recognize that marriage is very rapidly becoming only one way to raise children. (And other countries are obviously way ahead of the United States in incorporating a rational recognition of the vicissitudes of love, and the varieties of family life, into cultural attitudes toward unmarried parents.)
No doubt some children raised in non-traditional settings–like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas–turn out just fine. But the evidence on the poorer life prospects of the children single parents is overwhelming.
February 21st, 2012 | 1:18 pm
Poverty appears to be the new normal, too.
Families exist because they support and enrich their members, expanding their social, emotional, financial, economic, mental and psychological possibilities and resources.
How sad that people are voluntarily giving that up because they think they need to be afraid of trusting anyone enough to be in a family together.
February 21st, 2012 | 3:20 pm
[...] New York Times article on unwed pregnancy that everyone’s talking about? FHP alert: Amber Strader, 27, was in an on-and-off relationship with a clerk at [...]
February 21st, 2012 | 4:09 pm
The Planned Parenthood “bag of tricks” is the problem. Wide spread use of artificial contraception was supposed to eliminate unwed motherhood. It is apparent that it increases it.
Planned Parenthood promotes sexual promiscuity and the use artificial contraception as insurance that such promiscuity will have no consequences. Doing so has huge consequences among who do not have the maturity to use it consistently. This fact is an added benefit to Planned Parenthood, enhancing its abortion services income.
See:
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/how-planned-parenthood-hooks-kids-on-sex-warning-graphic-material
and
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/new-study-links-contraception-hike-with-increased-abortions/
February 21st, 2012 | 9:25 pm
Wide spread use of artificial contraception was supposed to eliminate unwed motherhood. It is apparent that it increases it.
A long time ago, on Joe Carter’s old blog he had a piece once about this teen couple. The girl said they were using condoms but then she decided to stop using them and get pregnant. Joe cited that as a failure of condoms…..which at the time I thought was kind of an odd way of looking at things. If you don’t put your seat belt on and end up smashing your face against the windshield, you can’t quite claim the seat belt failed.
I think the relevant fact to note here is not contraception failing but people failing to use contraception. And why do people fail to use contraception? Because they either want to get pregnant or are not very concerned with avoiding pregnancy.
In some groups I think a prime driver of this trend is lack of marriageable men. Quite a few women I think have decided on some level that they want to be mothers, if they can’t find a man worthy of marriage, they will find someone to father a child with.
Likewise income and wealth is pushing this trend everywhere else. Usually on other thread when the issue of SSM comes up people jump right to the assertion that marriage was created to promote having children. I think if you think about this for a few moments you realize its absurd. Humans are rather interesting animals in that having children is exceptionally costly and dangerous for us both as individuals as well as families and small societies. A pregnant woman is handicapped for most of a full year. Children are very slow to grow up and require a lot of energy to keep in line, feed, and train to become properly productive members of society.
Before we were so rich, when we lived on the margins of starvation and existence, a pregnancy at the wrong time could be a diaster. As a result many traditions around marriage and family arose not to promote having kids but to inhibit it. Pregnancy before marriage was a taboo, punishable by death in some cases. Virginity for females was prized and heavily guarded (yes these days pro-chastity groups try to pitch virginity to men too but the fact is traditionally it only mattered for women, Joseph was never in danger of being deemed unworthy to marry marry for not being a virgin, Mary’s pregnancy, though, was a very serious issue in regards to her pending marriage to Joesph) Marriage itself required large celebrations, ceremonies or doweries…all signals of material wealth that indicate the cost of losing a productive member for 9 months or so and feeding a new mouth that would require at least a few years before he could ‘earn his weight’ could be easily born by the family unit.
Now we as a species are more comfortable than we have ever been in history or compared to any other species. What happens with expensive things when people get more income? They buy more of them. Well today even in poor families no one starves to death because a pregnancy pulls them out of the labor force, few people who live on the street do so only because they lack resources. Like it or not we are having more kids because we can afford them and the boundaries are weakening because the costs of breaking them are getting lower.
Where does Planned Parenthood count in this trend? I’d say it’s more or less at zero. These trends are present in multiple countries that have developed into prosperity. It’s a bit too easy to confuse the surfer riding the wave as the surfer causing the wave….at least with sociological things like this.
Those who feel marriage has serious moral weight have reason to worry. But then maybe they should consider the difference between doing the right thing for the wrong reasons versus the right reasons. The spiritual arguments for things like virginity, chastity, faithfulness and so on remain unchanged by aleration in one’s material comfort. To a real degree the lack of unwed births in generations past was partially a case of ‘right thing, wrong reason’. People avoided, say, premarital sex to avoid social stigma, avoid scandal, avoid being forced to marry a substandard man rather than an upper class one etc. These may all be valid pragmatic concerns, but they aren’t really all that moral or spitirual. Bit like saying bank robbery isn’t worth trying these days because the police are very good and with DNA and video tapes its hard to pull one off. That might be true but that’s not moral in the sense that a moral person would say he wouldn’t rob a bank because its wrong. Maybe what you’re seeing then is not so much a moral decay as much as it is a moral revelation. As you remove more material incentives for various moral behavior, you see that a portion of moral behavior was simply not motivated by morality.
February 22nd, 2012 | 9:37 am
The girl said they were using condoms but then she decided to stop using them and get pregnant. Joe cited that as a failure of condoms…..which at the time I thought was kind of an odd way of looking at things.
Surely no more odd than the usual “failure of abstinence.”
February 22nd, 2012 | 11:18 am
Booton
Your explanation from increased prosperity fails to account for the fact that, throughout the developed world, total fertility rates have been in decline since the early 1970s.
In other words, we are seeing a rise in births outside marriage at a time when the overall birth rate is in decline.
February 22nd, 2012 | 12:14 pm
“The girl said they were using condoms but then she decided to stop using them and get pregnant. Joe cited that as a failure of condoms…..which at the time I thought was kind of an odd way of looking at things. ”
Did he cite it as a failure of condoms, or as a failure of the idea that telling people to use condoms prevents unwanted pregnancy?
If the latter, it makes perfect sense to me. Condoms reduce the risk of pregnancy significantly if you use them every single time you have sex. Bananas also reduce the risk of pregnancy if eat one and then use a condom every time you have sex. Condoms don’t just lie there and prevent pregnancy, you have to choose to use one *every* *single* *time* despite the fact that they’re something that no one would actually ever want to use, all other things being equal. And the real world actual human beings who don’t do the right (or desired) thing very consistently, that just doesn’t work.
February 23rd, 2012 | 1:23 pm
Ye Olde
Surely no more odd than the usual “failure of abstinence.”
Both might be categorized as something we might call an “Education Fallacy” which has the assumption that behavior is directly caused by education or lack of education as opposed to individual choice. If someone got pregnant because they honestly didn’t know that sex causes pregnancy, that’s a failure of sex ed (if they had it). If they got pregnant because a condom broke or because a birth control pill happened to have a manufacturing problem, that’s a failure of contraception. If they get pregnant after you give them a long lecture asking them to please not get pregnant until after they at least graduate high school, I suppose that’s a failure of your motivational lectures but it also might be a failure in your assumption that such behavior is directly controllable by finding just the right type of lecture.
Michael PS
Your explanation from increased prosperity fails to account for the fact that, throughout the developed world, total fertility rates have been in decline since the early 1970s.
I don’t think there’s any inconsistency. Women want to become moms, most don’t want to become pentamoms (no offense intended penta…). If they are well off materially (either their own income or mom and dad’s income or some combination of the two) but don’t see any men worthy of marriage they may choose to get pregnant without marriage….but not get pregnant as much as their grandmothers did in the old days.
So with this in mind let’s ask ourselves how exactly is fertility decreasing since the 70′s in prosperious nations? Are people having less sex? Probably not, with longer lifespans and the invention of viagra the average human probably has more sex in his or her lifetime these days than any previous era. Since people are healthier infertility isn’t the issue. Abortion is probably part of it, but abortion rates have been falling, NYC for example had a whopping 20% decline in the last 20 years which the pro-lifers here tried to cover up. So the difference has got to be contraception.
But no one ever said that people would continue to think about pregnancy the same way. The ‘career girl’ in 1970 probably thought of using the pill as a way to enjoy sex *until* she got married at which time she would consider pregnancy. Today we are seeing the ‘career girl’ entertain pregnancy as an option before marriage. That’s not really a failure of the pill or the ‘message of the pill’. If premarital pregnancy was as taboo now as it was in the past, pill or condom usage would probably be much more consistant and ‘accidents’ much fewer.
You may want to consider looking at immigrant populations from developing nations or females who come from places like the Middle East to attend school here in the US. They will engage in premarital sex (there’s even a niche medical business in ‘virginity restoration so they can return home and pretend to be virgins) but not premarital pregnancy….how is that possible? Well since avoiding pregnancy is serious business for them, they aren’t lax about using contraception.
What this all boils down too is not a ‘failure’ of either contraception or abstinence. It’s a shift away from it being ‘important’ to avoid pregnancy. Why does it seem less important to avoid pregnancy? Well a huge, very glaring, cause has to be that the costs of an inopportune pregnancy have dramatically declined.
Example B of this cultural shift: Nearly twenty years ago Dan Quayle made a ruckus over Murphey Brown not so much for having a child out of wedlock but setting a bad example for women who were not as financially well off as the fictional newscaster. Flashfoward to just 3-4 years ago and we see the same characters treating Bristol Palin as some type of hero for having a bastard kid with a boy who is basically a lowlife (HS drop out, from a broken family with dabs of low level criminality, a record of work that’s shall we say ‘inconsistent’). In an earlier age she would have been kept off the public stage and her mother would have been ridiculed as a failure for raising a daughter who ‘shamed’ herself. In fact in an earlier age she would have either been hidden, been given a secret abortion by the trusted ‘family doctor’ or might have been seculded to a home for unwed mothers and had the kid secretly adopted out. What’s different? Well for one thing the family is rich. Whether or not the father ever bothers to work a real job (other than posing for Playgirl and seeking out reality shows to star in), the family has the resources to give the kid a decent living. Many middle and lower middle class families are clearly not as well off as the Palins but they are still in the same boat, just not as big a boat.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact