Guilty (10 page)

In 1995, single mother Jennie Bain Ducker, twenty-one years old, left her two sons, aged one and two, buckled in their car seats with the windows rolled up outside a motel while she par-tied all night in a Nashville motel room with her boyfriend and three other men. When Ducker returned to the car in the morning, the boys were dead from the heat. It was estimated that the temperature in the car reached 120 degrees.
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In 1994, twenty-four-year-old separated single mother Susan Smith strapped her two sons into their car seats before sending the car to the bottom of a lake in Union, South Carolina. Her boyfriend had just broken up with her, telling her he didn't want to marry a woman with children.

If single mothers killing their children were any more common, Hallmark would have to introduce a card: “Honey, you were so sweet …
[open card]
… to murder your children for me.”

What makes these cases exceptional is that the mothers weren't teenagers and most of the children were older than one—having passed
the most likely time period for a mother to kill her child. And also contrary to the norm, these cases seem to involve the idealized, Murphy Brown–style single mothers—mostly middle-class white women. But unfortunately for their children, they were still single mothers.

Even when they kill their children, single mothers are portrayed as victims. In the book
Mothering and Ambivalence,
author Wendy Hollway defended the mothering instincts of Susan Smith and Jennie Bain Ducker by noting that before drowning or cooking their children to death, the “children were strapped into
safety
seats”—emphasis hers—thus demonstrating the mothers' “concern with the children's safety.”
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Yeah, you wouldn't want to drown a child who's running around loose in the car. He might bump his head—or try to escape.

An article criticizing the “maternal myths” promoted in news reports about women who kill their children explained that women “may kill their children because of economic stress, to avoid the social stigma of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, [or] because they feel isolated or depressed about a romantic relationship”
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—all factors that limit the suspects to single mothers. Sadly, the alleged “stigma” of single motherhood is not nearly so powerful as the real stigma against criticizing single mothers, even the ones who murder their own children.

After thirty-three-year-old single mother Danielle Blais drowned her six-year-old autistic son in a bathtub in 1996,
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the president of the Quebec Autism Society, Peter Zwack, leapt to the murderous mother's defense by explaining that an autistic child would be especially hard on a single mother: “She was all alone and that would have made things even more impossible.”
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Yes, even for someone with the parenting skills of a Danielle Blais!

How many crimes went unsolved in Orlando, Florida, while Casey Anthony led the police on one wild-goose chase after another? How many criminals escaped detection and capture in Union, South Carolina, while the police were tied up searching for Susan Smith's children when she knew they were at the bottom of a lake? Massive police resources were wasted, locally and nationally, looking for Smith's children for nine days, while she refused to tell the police that she had killed her children herself. What emergencies was the Westminster, Colorado, fire
department unable to respond to while they were putting out the fire set by Tami Lynn Richards's children while she was at a bar? What crimes did the Nashville police fail to stop while they were dealing with children who died after being left in their mother's sweltering car overnight?

IT's BAD ENOUGH THAT SINGLE MOTHERS ARE A GIANT DRAIN

on society, but it is really too much to be constantly asked to feel sorry for them. Instead of being grateful, these societal parasites whine about being victimized. In 2006, the liberal magazine
In These Times
complained that from “Reagan's ‘welfare queens,' Quayle's criticism of Murphy Brown and now Bush's dramatic slashing of social programs— single mothers have been under attack over the last 20 years.”
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Also in 2006, participants at a National Women's Studies Association meeting raged about the untold cruelties visited upon single mothers. Even Hillary Clinton had thoughtlessly “jumped on the marriage promotion bandwagon,” according to one speaker. These harpies demanded that single motherhood be affirmed as “the right of women.”
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Analysis that insightful is usually heard from people dressed in multiple layers of filthy clothing on a hot summer's day and pushing a grocery cart full of bottles and cans down an alley. But the idea that society owes single mothers has become conventional wisdom in America.

Even single mothers who became that way through artificial insemination are celebrated as deserving victims, which, unless they're claiming to have tripped and landed on top of a turkey baster full of semen, is not true.

Liberals view single women having babies by artificial insemination as a feminist success story. In an upbeat article about artificially inseminated single mothers, a
New York Times
reporter happily observed that a woman “can now select the father of her child from her living room and have his sperm sent directly to her doctor. It is faster and cheaper than adoption, and allows women to bear their own genetic offspring.”
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But it's not all sunshine and song. Some intolerant people make remarks that are hurtful to women who have made the difficult, deeply
personal choice to ruin their own child's life. As
Babytalk
magazine somberly reported, “Unmarried moms do feel the sting of prejudice.”
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The
New York Times
noted that the “most common accusation” is that intentional single mothers are “selfish,” which the
Times
explained was based on a “widely held belief that two-parent homes are best for children.” One of the single mothers by artificial insemination indignantly reported that a friend had suggested that she “channel” her nurturing instincts into working at a children's hospital instead of becoming a single mother. To this impertinent remark, she retorted, “Can you say ‘condescending'??”
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Another single mother by artificial insemination said that “the child was more important than the partner.”
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She might want to check with the child on that one. But the
Times
explained that these women have seen friends in unhappy marriages. What does the child's life chances matter when a woman is “not willing,” as the
Times
article said, “to settle for ‘Mr. Almost Right' in order to have a baby”?
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The
Los Angeles Times
quoted another single mother by artificial insemination, who said, “You're paying for it, so you kind of want the best of the best.”
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Call me old-fashioned, but when someone is promoting eugenics like that I prefer it in the original German. So she got the best sperm to create a child that she will raise in the worst possible environment for the development of a well-adjusted human being: fatherless. One member of Single Mothers by Choice sacrificed premarital sex while she was pregnant, which I gather is considered a herculean feat these days. “You go through an awful lot of trouble to get pregnant,” she said. “You don't want to blow it on one night of fun.”
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Perhaps she'll be able to use that years later to browbeat her kid when he misbehaves. “I didn't sacrifice countless hours of casual sex to have you so you could live like a pig! Now go clean your room!”

In one of several pieces over the years celebrating single mothers by choice,
Marie Claire
magazine ran stories of various such heroes, including one artificially inseminated single mother who bravely confronted society's “belief that a child should have a father. She recounted an e-mail exchange with a colleague after he found out she was pregnant:

“I didn't know that you were married,” he wrote.

“I'm not,” I replied, annoyed.

“Who's the father?” he pressed.

“I don't know his name,” I shot back.
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Next, the artificially inseminated single mother let a post office worker have it for being confused when she gave “none” as the father's name: “The clerk at the crowded post office couldn't fathom it. ‘Every child has a father!' she kept insisting. Finally, I shouted back, ‘Well, mine has a sperm donor!' The room fell silent.”
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And to think people used to say single mothers are “overtly dominant, aggressive, narcissistic and bitterly hostile.”
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These women are inflicting social pathologies on their own children for which society will pay and all we get are upbeat articles about how nice it is that single women were able to conceive. “I could not have imagined my life without being a mother,” one artificially inseminated single mother said. “This wasn't a hard decision for me. For me it was an absolute.”
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Isn't that nice for her? Isn't it an “absolute” for car thieves that they take the car? At least she has the one trait that makes for a great mother: a narcissistic obsession with self-indulgence. It's as if society were under attack by a pack of wolves, while the blabocracy praises the wolves, builds them habitats, and publishes books on how to breed more wolves.

SOCIETY LOVES SINGLE MOTHERS SO MUCH WE KEEP CREATING more and more of them. In 2003, there were more than 10 million single mothers in the United States, up from about 3 million in 1970.
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How did this happen? The plague of single motherhood isn't merely an inevitable decay brought on by stupid choices of the underclass. It is the active social policy of liberals. After winning a Pulitzer Prize, the Left's author laureate Toni Morrison told
Time
magazine in 1989, “The little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. It doesn't work for white people or for black people. Why we are hanging on to it, I don't know.”
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(Of course, Toni Morrison was also under the impression that Bill Clinton was a black man.) Gloria Steinem's most dazzling
accomplishment was coming up with the saying “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”—proving that a woman has to be twice as stupid as a man does in order to be recognized as stupid. The National Organization for Women sells a bumper sticker with the motto “One Nuclear Family Can Ruin Your Whole Life.”
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Barbara Ehrenreich, a columnist for
Time
magazine in the 1990s, wrote that the family is “personal hell,” a “nest of pathology and a cradle of gruesome violence,” where “we learn nasty things like hate and rage and shame.”
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To paraphrase Pat Buchanan's response to Hillary Clinton's comparison of the family to slavery: Speak for yourself, Barbara. She cites a “long and honorable tradition of ‘anti-family' thought” that, oddly enough, includes nothing from C. S. Lewis, Paul Johnson, John Dos Passos, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Sowell, or any other conservative favorites.

Ehrenreich wrote:

I guess these are household names among liberals. Ehrenreich, who, surprisingly enough, is divorced, sneers at “a culture that fetishizes the family as the ideal unit of human community.”
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She claims that “for a woman, home is, statistically speaking, the most dangerous place to be.”
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