Guilty (7 page)

We can't blame mothers who get divorced for being single mothers: We should blame both mothers and fathers. Divorce typically proceeds from adultery, abandonment, or abuse—and there are only two suspects, both of whom are the parents of the children whose lives will forever be harmed by the dissolution of a marriage. After interviewing nearly one hundred children of divorce, Linda Bird Francke, a divorced
mother who wrote the book
Growing Up Divorced,
said almost all were sad and virtually all were angry.
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In any event, divorced mothers should be called “divorced mothers,” not “single mothers.” We also have a term for the youngsters involved: “the children of divorce,” or as I call them, “future strippers.” It is a mark of how attractive it is to be a phony victim that divorcées will often claim to belong to the more disreputable category of “single mothers.”

Far more cruel than bequeathing your children a broken family through divorce is to raise children out of wedlock. True “single mothers” are women who, by their own volition, have done everything in their power to ruin their children's lives before they're even born. It makes no difference if the pregnancy was unplanned, unwanted, or accidental. And many aren't any of those. Getting pregnant isn't like catching the flu. There are volitional acts involved—someone else explain it to Dennis Kucinich. By this purposeful act, single mothers cause irreparable harm to other human beings—their own children—as countless studies on the subject make clear. Not only do single mothers hurt their children, they also foist a raft of social pathologies on society. Look at almost any societal problem and you will find it is really a problem of single mothers.

IS IT CRUEL TO DESCRIBE THE LIFE CHANCES SINGLE MOTHERS are giving their children? How about compared with actually doing that to children at a rate of about 1.5 million a year?

If a child in the womb could choose one fact about his parents— rich, good-looking, intelligent, easygoing, athletic, went to Harvard, black, or white—the one factor that would improve his life chances more than any other is that they be married. (Or at least the second choice, right after “Mother is not ‘pro-choice.' ”) The only thing a baby shouldn't want is parents who divorce or—worst of all—were never married. That's starting life with a losing hand.

Liberal think tanks denounce efforts to promote marriage, deceptively chirping, as Mary Parke of the Center for Law and Social Policy did, that most children in single-parent homes “grow up without serious problems.”
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Yes, and most smokers won't die of lung disease.

The evidence of the damage of single parenthood is so blindingly obvious even liberals have started to admit it. A 2004
New York Times Magazine
article on welfare families by Jason DeParle said, “Mounds of social science, from the left and the right, leave little doubt that the children of single-parent families face heightened risks.” Calling a single-parent family “a double dose of disadvantage,”
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the
Times
article cited as “the definitive text” a book by sociologists Sara McLana-han and Gary Sandefur that concluded, back in 1994, “In our opinion, the evidence is quite clear: Children who grow up in a household with only one biological parent are worse off, on average, than children who grow up in a household with both of their biological parents, regardless of the parents' race or educational background.”
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That's an understatement. The eminent social scientist Charles Murray says, “Illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of our time—more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare or homelessness because it drives everything else.”
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Here is the lottery ticket that single mothers are handing their innocent children by choosing to raise them without fathers: Controlling for socioeconomic status, race, and place of residence, the strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a single parent.
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By 1996, 70 percent of inmates in state juvenile detention centers serving long-term sentences were raised by single mothers.
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Seventy-two percent of juvenile murderers and 60 percent of rapists come from single-mother homes.
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Seventy percent of teenage births,
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dropouts, suicides,
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runaways, juvenile delinquents, and child murderers involve children raised by single mothers.
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Girls raised without fathers are more sexually promiscuous and more likely to end up divorced.
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A 1990 study by the Progressive Policy Institute showed that after controlling for single motherhood, the difference between black and white crime rates disappeared.
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Various studies come up with slightly different numbers, but all the figures are grim. According to the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, children from single-parent families account for 63 percent of all youth suicides, 70 percent of all teenage pregnancies, 71 percent
of all adolescent chemical/substance abuse, 80 percent of all prison inmates, and 90 percent of all homeless and runaway children.
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A study cited in the
Village Voice
produced similar numbers. It found that children brought up in single-mother homes “are five times more likely to commit suicide, nine times more likely to drop out of high school, 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances, 14 times more likely to commit rape (for the boys), 20 times more likely to end up in prison, and 32 times more likely to run away from home.”
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Single motherhood is like a farm team for future criminals and social outcasts.

With new children being born, running away, dropping out of high school, and committing murder every year, it's not a static problem to analyze. But however the numbers are run, single motherhood is a societal nuclear bomb.

Many of these studies, for example, are from the 1990s, when the percentage of teenagers raised by single parents was lower than it is today. In 1990, 28 percent of children under eighteen were being raised in one-parent homes (mother or father), and 71 percent were being raised in two-parent homes.
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By 2005, more than one-third of all babies born in the United States were illegitimate. That's a lot of social problems coming.

Imagine an America with 70 percent fewer juvenile delinquents, 70 percent fewer teenage births, 63 to 70 percent fewer teenage suicides, and 70 percent to 90 percent fewer runaways and you will appreciate what the sainted single mothers have accomplished. Even in liberals' fevered nightmares, predatory mortgage dealers, oil speculators, and Ken Lay could never do as much harm to their fellow human beings as single mothers do.

The problem is not confined to the United States. With a welfare state similar to America's,
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Britain leads Europe in the proportion of single mothers—and also is ranked by UNICEF at the bottom of all industrialized nations in the well-being of its children. Britain tops the European Union in crime—including violent crime—alcohol and drug abuse, obesity, and sexually transmitted diseases, though some are ties.
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Citing these statistics in a 2007 article in
Maclean's
magazine, British journalist Martin Newland said, “Increasingly, but belatedly,
politicians are beginning to identify the decline of marriage and the family as the major cause of … social dysfunctions including ill health, crime, rampant promiscuity and welfare dependency.”

Family breakdown is not spread evenly throughout the population. America has more than twice as many teenage births as other developed nations,
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80 percent of which are out of wedlock.
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Only 4 percent of college graduates have illegitimate children. Sixteen percent of college graduates will get divorced, compared with 46 percent of high school dropouts, despite the fact that high school dropouts are less likely to get married in the first place.
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This rash of single motherhood is breeding a huge underclass. Half of the single mothers in the United States are below the poverty line, making their children six times more likely to be in poverty than children with married parents.
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Single mothers account for 85 percent of homeless families.
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Ninety percent of welfare recipients are single mothers.
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According to Isabel V. Sawhill of the liberal Brookings Institution, almost all of the increase in child poverty since the 1970s is attributable to the increase in single-parent families.
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The 2004
New York Times Magazine
article describing the world of welfare families hinted at the problem, saying that if you dig down deep in the world of the underclass “you hit a geyser of father-yearning.”
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The English doctor who writes under the pen name “Theodore Dalrymple” says the conceptual framework of the underclass is to see themselves as the passive victims of circumstances, with no control over their own lives. This is a worldview unique to two groups—derelicts and liberals. Dalrymple reports that three murderers in the prison he serves used the exact same words to describe their crimes: “The knife went in.” As Dalrymple says, “That the long-hated victims were sought out, and the knives carried to the scene of the crimes, was as nothing compared with the willpower possessed by the inanimate knives themselves, which determined the unfortunate outcome.” Murderers view their arrests for murder a matter of bad “luck.” All their life choices are things that happen to them, these “marionettes of happenstance.”
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It's the same thing with battered women who act as if they could not possibly have foreseen the violent tendencies in their boyfriends.
This, Dalrymple says, “serves to absolve them of all responsibility for whatever happens thereafter, allowing them to think of themselves as victims alone rather than the victims and accomplices they are.” And yet Dalrymple demonstrates that they knew exactly what they were getting into with the men who beat them. He ascertains this by asking battered women two questions: (1) Do you think I could have guessed by looking at your boyfriend that he would beat you? (Answer: Yes); and (2) What do you think I noticed about your boyfriend that would cause me to know he would beat you? (Answer: the tattoos, the scars, the shaved head, etc.). Thus, Dalrymple concludes that they knew it, too, but acted as if their boyfriends' beating them was a bolt out of the blue in order to hold themselves blameless for hooking up with abusive men.
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How much stranger is it to act as if unwed pregnant women have nothing to do with their circumstances? Getting pregnant isn't like getting cancer. Single mothers don't occur randomly in the population. As any kindergartner in today's public schools can tell you, pregnancy is the result of having sex without using a condom.

And yet a 1992
New York Times
article about single mothers on welfare used the exact same passive voice of the criminal described by Dalrymple. According to the
Times,
the women became pregnant out of wedlock when “their youth was overtaken by motherhood.”
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External factors caused their dilemmas, not their own free will: “Being black and from the inner city also raised the likelihood of dependency.” Adopting the language of irresponsibility that has done so much for the poor, the fifteen-year-old son of an unwed mother told the
Times,
“My mother ain't got the money…. That's the kind of stuff that makes you sell drugs. You want something, and you ain't got nothing in your pocket.”
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A
Times
editorial explained that the “true enemy” is “poverty.”
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For half a century, American welfare policy was premised on the insane idea that being poor causes single motherhood and crime, rather than that single motherhood causes criminal behavior and poverty. The result of treating a symptom rather than the cause was that all three—poverty, single motherhood, and crime—skyrocketed.

A single mother in West Virginia explained her unwed pregnancy to
The Economist,
saying, “It just happened.”
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Our entire political class and popular culture seem to agree: Single motherhood just happens. We must all pretend that single women are passive victims of their own incredibly stupid choices and then extol them for their pluck.

A book praising single mothers denounces those in middle-class America who “implicitly assume that girls and young women would have more control over their lives if they deferred motherhood.” Apparently, deferring motherhood until marriage is impossible for the poor because the knife went in— Wait, no, because they “rarely see such choices” as marriage “as open to them at all.”
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Perhaps they would see such choices more clearly if the entire liberal establishment were not constantly praising single mothers and sneering at the unhip, drab middle class with their bourgeois prejudices against having children out of wedlock.

Having money doesn't make you middle-class. The secret to being middle-class in America is: Keep your knees together before marriage and graduate from high school. That's it! Anyone who does those two things has a smaller chance of being in poverty than a boy from the Dal-ton School has of being in the Navy SEALs. We could wipe out chronic poverty in America tomorrow if women could just manage to get married before having children—and to stay married after having children.

But reinforcing the idea that single motherhood is just a matter of rotten luck on the order of a brick falling on your head—or, apparently, knifing someone in a pub—liberals respond to the crisis of single motherhood by demanding yet more instruction in birth control. It's society's fault that teenagers are getting pregnant.