When It Comes to Illegitimacy, We’re Living in Separate Worlds: An Update on the White Underclass

By Charles Murray

The New York Times has gotten around to reporting something that has been known for a couple of months, that in 2007 the U.S. illegitimacy ratio (the proportion of live births that occur to unmarried women) reached the truly remarkable, once unthinkable, figure of 40 percent.

The news behind the news here, something the Times doesn’t mention, is that illegitimacy varies enormously by socioeconomic class. There’s now an exceptionally clean data base for examining this: The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth that followed (among others) women born from 1957 to 1964 through their entire childbearing years. We now know with no statistical complications the profile of their children. Since so much of the commentary about American out-of-wedlock births gets tangled up in issues of race and ethnicity, let’s take them out of the equation and limit the numbers to whites of European origin.

http://blog.american.com/?p=714

About the octuplets' Mom

When the sexual revolution began, we were all excited about having sex without babies. Now, we have come full circle: we are having babies without having sex. (That's a little bit like skipping dessert and going straight for the brussels sprouts, but, never mind.)
Anyhow, more is emerging about Nadya Suleman, who has had 14 children, without having sex.

It still isn't clear who their father is, or who fathered Suleman's other six children, who range in age from 2 to 7.

Suleman listed a David Solomon as the father on the birth certificates for her first four children but gave a different birthday for him on each certificate and listed both Israel and California as his place of birth. He could not be located for comment.

She listed no father on the birth certificates for her fifth and sixth children, twins born in 2006.

Suleman herself has been known by different names over the years, including Natalie Suleman, Natalie Gutierrez, Nadya Gutierrez and Nadya Doud.

Suleman was married to Marcos Gutierrez in 1996 and was divorced last year, according to public records. Gutierrez did not return calls to numbers listed for him, and his divorce lawyer, Roberto Gil, declined to comment.

Divorce papers state the couple split up in 2000 and had no children, although Suleman had given birth to her first six children by the time the divorce was finalized.

This is the stuff of which the bloggers howl: irresponsible, counting on others to help her, etc.
But some touching details have emerged that shed some light on her motives.

Public records show Suleman's father has used the last names Doud and Suleman. Her parents married in Las Vegas in 1974 and divorced in 1999. Suleman was their only child.

And in another interview, the most touching detail:

In her first interview since giving birth to octuplets, Nadya Suleman tells NBC she wanted a huge family to make up for the isolation she says she always felt as an only child.

In a brief excerpt of the interview released Thursday, the 33-year-old single mother tells "Today" show anchor Ann Curry she had a dysfunctional childhood and sought to erase that with the closeness children could bring. NBC says the full interview will air Monday.

This is reminiscent of the motives I saw among the teen mothers I met in Reno last month. This is what I surmised from the girls themselves and from their social worker. "These girls get pregnant because they want to: they want to be loved by their boyfriends, and by their babies."
I wrote about them here:
My cyberspace friend, Dutch Martin, wrote to agree with me, though I don't see that he posted about it.

Mom might be the reason dad is not there....

This moving and honest article by Renee Mitchell just moved to the top of my list of must-shares.

this is my way of making amends for contributing to the epidemic of children being raised by single parents. I've come to realize: Fatherlessness can sometimes be a result of the mother's choices.

When I made the decision to divorce my children's father and move to Portland when our twins were age 2, I thought I was the only parent my sons, Alex and Zavier, would ever need. I was mistaken.

Read it all here.

Mama Mia! A Girl Needs a Papa!

My friend David Benkof sent me this commentary about the new ABBA movie:

Gay men flocked to see Mamma Mia! this past weekend, drawn by the show-tune jukebox musical, the openly gay character played by Colin Firth, and the gay icon Christine Baranski in a stunning supporting role. That's not to mention Meryl Streep, who was simply fabulous. But how many gay viewers actually noticed the most important and socially relevant theme of the musical, which is that girls who grow up without a father feel like there's something missing? Sophie, the bride who invites three possible Dads to her wedding, isn't just curious about who provided half of her DNA. She's aching for the missing father she never had as a child and an adolescent, and she wants him to celebrate her wedding. The father role could have been filled by someone other than her biological father, but not even the butchest lesbian would have sufficed. Why can't gay people look at Mamma Mia!, tap their toes, sing along, and realize that whatever kind of equality we ask for, we need to respect that whenever possible, children need both a mother and a father?

I have noticed that Hollywood very often presents stories that are not politically correct. "Juno" comes to mind as another example. When Hollywood wants to tell a good story, some of the political correctness has to go out the window, because it just isn't believable! It is not credible to think that a young girl would be completely indifferent about the identity of her father, or of whether she even has a father. I agree with David that it would be refreshing if gay people re-evaluated their political priorities. It would also be refreshing if the highly visible Hollywood types who promote the sexual revolution in so many ways, actually watched their own movies long enough to see that the sexual revolution hasn't made people happy.

Family Issues are Fiscal Issues

Speaking of poverty, my article on the Acton site takes a careful look at the Institute for American Values study on the impact of family fragmentation on the taxpayers. That study looks at how family fragmentation affects poverty, and after that, asks how dealing with the poverty costs the federal and state level taxpayers.

Settling for Mr. Good Enough

Comediene Lori Gottlieb makes the case for "Settling" for Mr. Good Enough, rather than holding out for Mr. Right. Gottlieb is a 40 year old single mother, who is candid enough to admit that she really did, and still does, want to be married. Some of her article is sad, other parts are wise.

Now, though, I realize that if I don’t want to be alone for the rest of my life, I’m at the age where I’ll likely need to settle for someone who is settling for me. What I and many women who hold out for true love forget is that we won’t always have the same appeal that we may have had in our 20s and early 30s. Having turned 40, I now have wrinkles, bags under my eyes, and hair in places I didn’t know hair could grow on women. With my nonworking life consumed by thoughts of potty training and playdates, I’ve become a far less interesting person than the one who went on hiking adventures and performed at comedy clubs. But when I chose to have a baby on my own, the plan was that I would continue to search for true connection afterward; it certainly wasn’t that I would have a baby alone only to settle later. After all, wouldn’t it have been wiser to settle for a higher caliber of “not Mr. Right” while my marital value was at its peak?

Those of us who choose not to settle in hopes of finding a soul mate later are almost like teenagers who believe they’re invulnerable to dying in a drunk-driving accident. We lose sight of our mortality. We forget that we, too, will age and become less alluring. And even if some men do find us engaging, and they’re ready to have a family, they’ll likely decide to marry someone younger with whom they can have their own biological children. Which is all the more reason to settle before settling is no longer an option.

For really outstanding commentary on this article, check out my friends at mercatornet.com.
This article has a deeper and more sophisticated view of love.

Love is a single reality with different dimensions that are needed or emerge at different times. One dimension is necessary to attract a person to another, but this becomes less necessary over time and especially as one matures. This is eros, or the "madness" that intoxicates, displaces reason and drives a person powerfully toward another. It is the central theme for movie romances and modern sitcoms.

But for all its thrills, this dimension is not enough. In fact, on its own it becomes an obstacle to the maturing of the relationship. We see this played out all the time. Love is reduced to its caricature, to the amount of gratification that each can take from it. Bartering begins: "I'll do this if you do that." "I will stay with you as long as the sparks last." "If you love me you will let me do what I want." "I won't have children with you until I have had my career and spent my youth." "You can have children but I am not going to let this cramp my style". "I will absorb all you can give to me, your good humour, good looks, money, sensuality but I am not prepared to give you anything back." It destroys the relationship or at worst leaves spouses in a permanent adolescent-style union.

The other dimension is the reaching out of one person to the other. It is a love that is, indeed, ecstasy -- not a momentary sensual intoxication but an exodus out of oneself, seeking liberation through giving oneself to the other. It is a journey toward authentic self discovery and happiness. This is played out in different ways: the sharing of hopes, dreams, values, desires, sorrows and disappointments, successes and failures, laughter and tears, and of our sexuality by pleasure giving and childbearing.

The overly-romanticized view of love is actually a rather self-centered view of love. I devote several chapters of Love and Economics to love. To love is to will and to do the good of the other. Love is a decision.

Mothers Alone

is the title Policy Review gives to Amy Wax's outstanding review of two rather bad books: Ann Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v. Wade, and
Rosanna Hertz, Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women are Choosing Parenthood without Marriage and Creating the New American Family.

In Ann Fessler’s book, women born at mid-century reminisce about becoming pregnant out of wedlock and relinquishing their children for adoption in the decades before the sexual revolution and the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. In Rosanna Hertz’s, the daughters of that generation recount their experiences as women who have decided to become mothers outside of marriage. Fessler’s stories tell of coming of age amidst the seismic shift in sexual mores that yielded the world as we know it. Hertz provides a window into the lives some women live in that world.

The two books in question can't get past their post-modern and feminist categories of thought to observe the data right in front of their noses. The birth mothers who placed their children for adoption do not really see abortion, that is, their child's non-existence, as the solution. The children of the single mothers by choice are "staunchly unreconstructed," in that they want to know their fathers.
The larger problem, which neither author takes seriously, is the question of how to manage sexuality and child-bearing in a world without marriage. Here is Amy Wax.

Implicit (and sometimes explicit) in their complaints is the expectation — indeed the demand — that they should have been “helped” to keep their babies. This book’s central flaw, its core evasion, is its failure to come to grips with that expectation. All eyes are averted from its true implications. How can the demand for “help” mean anything other than its being incumbent on others — family, friends, society, the government — to provide these girls with the funds needed to raise a child alone, without marriage, men or fathers. These women’s complaints lead inexorably to an entitlement depressingly familiar in its contours and consequences: a welfare state in which the public pledges unconditional financial support for mothers barely out of girlhood. It leads, in short, to the wholesale bankrolling of children having children. The sins of this path require no rehearsal. Suffice it to say that we have been there and done that. We know where it leads: men without roots, domestic chaos, deprived children, social pathology — and wholesale political rebellion against the unseemly spectacle of welfare as we know it.

Like Hertz and her single-mothers, Fessler and her birth mothers simply fail to confront their own wishes writ large. The broader question of how to run the railroad does not trouble them. They are not concerned with the norms we all should live by. Rather, to borrow Michael Oakeshott’s phrase, these women are taken up with their own “felt needs.” Every hurt (self-inflicted or not) must be addressed and every hardship (defensible or not) assuaged. In this calculus, the dislocations of individual lives are all that matter. Hertz’s and Fessler’s moms are here to tell their stories, not devise wise rules for social life. The conundrums of social policy get pushed off into the background in favor of an endless recital of grievances against the order. Cut loose from a coherent moral framework, they give little thought to the world their desires would entail.

While this review is harsh toward the Life-style Left, Wax ends with an implied critique of the Right, which is not providing realistic answers. Read it all.

The Missing Headline: Unmarried Births Rise

My latest article on Mercator Net is here.

Horrors! The teen birth rate rises!

Thus spake the mainstream media when preliminary data from the Centres for Disease Control showed that the teen birth rate rose three per cent in 2006, the first rise since 1991. The mainstream media reacted true to form. They rounded up the usual suspects: abstinence education and those pesky Christian conservatives. If only the media had troubled to examine the whole report, though, they might have noticed a few things that didn’t fit their template of sex-education-good, abstinence-bad.
...
The unmarried mothers’ birth rate rose over twice as much as the teen birth rate. But the mainstream media did not find this worthy of comment. So, let’s ask ourselves why they choose to emphasize one figure, the increase in teen births, over an increase in unmarried childbearing.

Read it all here.

Bad (or just weird) advice from Carolyn Hax

The subject is single mothers: how do their families react to the news of single-motherhood-to-be?
Here is the letter:

I have to see some very conservative, judge-y relatives who have just learned that I'm pregnant (not married, and not planning on getting married). Is there a limit to how many times I can respond to them just by saying, “Wow”? Should I keep a tally?

Maybe we should have some kind of prize for whoever manages to use it most at family gatherings this year.

This letter is weird. (I was trying to find the original on Carolyn Hax's chat room, but have come up short so far.) Is this woman expecting the relatives to say nasty things, or to say "WOW" or is she planning to say "WOW" herself when they say nasty jugdmental things? Can't tell.
Anyhow, here is CH's response:

Who knows, maybe they'll surprise you. I mean, what are they going to suggest, that you have an abortion? Aside from adoption, anything else they could be thinking is a ship that has clearly already sailed.

I can actually think of a number of things they might say, like, "you're an idiot," or "thank god you aren't marrying the idiot boyfriend."
Or, they might say "WOW" to suppress the urge to say "I feel sorry for your kid," or, "don't ask me to babysit."
Some of the comments on CH's column actually have better sense:

LW3 (Letter Writer #3) might remember that her conservative, judgmental family members are likely to be the only ones she has to turn to when her sperm donor disappears for greener pastures. Being a single motherhood is not a bed of roses even under the best of circumstances. Single mothers and their children need help from relatives. Becoming defensive and alienating potential sources of support will not help.

Carolyn's comment that "The ship has already sailed" strikes me as weird, because the ship is barely out of the harbor. This poor woman has no idea what she is getting herself into. (If she did, I doubt she would be taking this attitude toward her relatives.) The problems associated with single motherhood are legion. See for instance, here and here. This letter-writer sounds just a tad judgemental and self-righteous herself, for somebody who is embarking on such a high-risk life plan as single-motherhood.
I suggest bungee-jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. More thrills, and nobody gets hurt except the thrill-seeker herself.

The Missing Headline

Here is my article on unmarried childbearing.

the increase in unmarried childbearing must be laid directly at the doorstep of the weird ideological cocktail that is the modern American sexual ethos: feminism, consumerism and sexual liberation. Women don’t need men. Women are entitled to have a baby if they want, when they want, on any terms they want. Sex is a private recreational activity that is no big deal.

Some adherents of this ideology believe that unmarried childbearing is actually a good thing. Modern single mothers are striking a blow for women’s independence. We can’t possibly expect the media establishment, which is really the mouthpiece for the sexual revolution, to pass judgment on the choice to become an unmarried mother, even though the data tell us that it is a really dumb choice.

Increase in Unmarried Childbearing

Maggie Gallagher has an article on this hidden nugget within the report on the increase in teen births. I expect to have something on the same topic soon....

Another Lesbian Mother Changes Her Mind...

This case from the UK has a slightly different fact pattern from the US case I posted last week. Still troubling.

Women Exploiting Men

That is all I could think of when I read this story over at Leonard Link.
A lesbian couple is suing their sperm donor for child support, for a child who is now 18 years old. As much as I believe that fathers should be involved in their children's lives, and that fathers should be held accountable to support their children, the facts of this case bother me:

Nassau County Family Court Judge Ellen R. Greenberg has ruled that a married male doctor who allegedly donated sperm more than 18 years ago to a lesbian medical resident at the hospital where he worked who wanted to have a child with her same-sex partner, who is also a doctor, may not deny paternity in a recently filed child support proceeding, even though he claims that he was assured that he would have no support obligations when he agreed to donate the sperm. P.D. v. S.K., Docket No. U-2725-07 (Nassau County, N.Y, Family Court, Nov. 16, 2007) (to be published in NY Law Journal on Nov. 29)....
The mother is identified in court papers as P.D., the alleged father as S.K., and the child, a boy now 18 years old, as K.K.

... S.K. stated that he had agreed to be a sperm donor at P.D.’s request. "He submits that while he was married at the time, he agreed, based upon numerous promises that he would have no rights or benefits in raising the child, nor any financial responsibilities," wrote Judge Greenberg. S.K. provided the sperm to P.D.’s partner, who performed the insemination. The child was born in 1989.

S.K. indicated that he allowed his name to appear as father on the birth certificate, because he "felt it was in K.K.’s best interests that he would have an identity when he grew older." S.K. acknowledged that from K.K.’s birth until 1993 he had contact with the child, but in that year the lesbian couple and child moved to Oregon, and S.K.’s contact dropped off to occasional phone calls and one meeting for a few hours three years ago. S.K. did send gifts, cards and letters to the child on special occasions, signed "Dad" or "Daddy," and also made some monetary contributions to P.D....
Judge Greenberg ... noted that "the child has never known anyone other than the respondent as his father, and that the respondent has sent him money, gifts and cards which are signed either ‘Dad’ or ‘Daddy.’ Therefore, the burden shifts to the respondent (the father)..."

"Here, the respondent concedes that he has sent cards, money and gifts over the last fifteen years and that he allowed his name to be listed on the child’s birth certificate as the father because he ‘felt it was in the child’s best interests that he would have an identity.’ Further, the respondent has held himself out as the child’s father. Allowing the respondent to deny paternity after eighteen years where the child has believed the respondent to be his father would have a traumatic effect upon the child and would be contrary to his best interests."...
The court sent the case back to the Support Magistrate for fact finding on child support "based on the mother’s earning capacity, the reported income of her live-in partner as appropriate, and the current income of the respondent." Since the "child" is already 18, one speculates that perhaps the reason the support order was filed now was in order to enlist the father’s financial contribution to his college education. (Addendum: This speculation was confirmed in the NY Law Journal's November 29 article about the case.)

The problem with this case is the on-again, off-again nature of the mother's inclusion of the father in the child's life. The initial claim was that the mother would never ask for child support. The mother moved away, making a relationship with the father nearly impossible for the child. The mother is asking for the father's financial involvement because she needs it for the child's college tuition.
This seems to me to be the woman exploiting the man. She got what she wanted: the opportunity to raise a child with little interference from the child's father. She used him as a sperm bank. Now she is trying to use him as a wallet.
Let me be clear: the problem with this case is NOT the fact that the mother has a lesbian partner. I would dislike this behavior just as much, if the mother were a single mother without a partner of either sex. Come to think of it, it might even be worse if she had acquired an opposite sex partner, and had come back after all these years to ask for child support....

Single Mothers by Choice

My latest article was published by the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, which is a Focus on the Family affiliate. My article is called, "Single Mothers by Choice" and begins on pg 20 of the magazine. The subtitle gives it away: "A valid lifestyle choice, or another example of dumb sex?" Especially noteworthy is the sidebar, which draws on David Blankenhorn's new book, The Future of Marriage. Family scholar Paul Amato of Penn, did a calculation, asking what the world would be like for adolescents today if the rate of married parenthood were the same as it was in 1970. Not the Dreaded Ozzie and Harriett 1950's (que up scary music), but the beginning of the groovy 1970's. Amato calculates there would
643,oo fewer American adolescents failing a grade each year.
over a million fewer adolescents suspended from school,
453,000 fewer involved in violence
62,000 fewer youth would attempt suicide.
Putting the percentage of kids living with their two married parents back to 1970 is not a utopian pipedream: it would require an increase of about 9 percentage points.
Let us not give up.

Children without Sex

The inventor of the Pill looks forward to the day when women can routinely harvest and freeze their eggs in their twenties and thaw them to have children later in life. Two problems with this: first, we are structuring the woman's reproductive life around the economic system, instead of structuring the economic system around the woman's fertility.

Carl Djerassi believes putting eggs on ice will have benefits to the health of "babies born to older mothers".

Biologically, the ideal age to have a child would be 18-20, after which the woman could go to university and have a career.

"In those circumstances, society would have to make arrangements for childcare, which it is does not do, so women are waiting till their careers are established and they can afford good childcare," he says.

"The problem with this is that the moment a woman hits 35 the risk of her having a child with Down’s syndrome increases four to six times.

"At that age she has lost 90-95 percent of her eggs, and those that are left are ageing rapidly. Storing her eggs is her insurance policy against the future. I think you will get the odd woman of 60 or 70 who will decide to have a baby, but most will be in their 30s and 40s."

He admits that the healthiest thing for the woman is to have her children in her twenties, but dismisses that as impossible. We could make it possible for women to get married, stay married, have kids early and return to the labor force. Why not make that a priority? There is much more involved than "providing childcare."
The second problem is that Babies without Sex really and truly means Babies without Relationships. Having babies without sex is a counter-intuitive twist: It's a little bit like skipping dessert and going straight for the brussels sprouts. But the real thing we are avoiding is relationship: normalizing non-sexual procreation amounts to a final and complete retreat from the spousal relationship and the ultimate marginalization of men from the family.
The advocates of contraception have never been willing to take responsibility for the destruction to human relationships that their methods have ushered into society. The claims of this 83 year old enabler of the Sexual Revolution sound almost comically naive:

"There are so many unwanted children in the world," he says.
"This would be a way of helping to reduce the number of unwanted children. Every child born to a woman who has taken a conscious decision to have a child at that time would be wanted and loved and properly cared for.

Can any serious person claim that there are no longer unwanted children today, or even that there are fewer "unwanted" children today than there were prior to the Pill? Can any serious person claim that child abuse has been reduced? This man is dreaming.

Taxpayers Left Holding the Baby

Taxpayers Left Holding the Baby is the name the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs gave to my article about the fact that 55% of births in that state were paid for by Medicaid. I don't cite the usual cuplrits. The young women of Oklahoma are not stupid. But the older people who make policy may be....