Ruth Institute Blog

by Helen M. Alvaré, J.D., Senior Fellow in Law and Academic Advisory Board Member of the Ruth Institute.

This is the last in my series of columns on out of wedlock births.  By now you know that 4 in 10 U.S. births are nonmarital; this rises to 7 in 10 for African-American Women, and  5 in 10 for Hispanic women, our fastest growing minority population. Women in their 20s and 30s account for the lion’s share of the trend. [1]  Reactions to our predicament are suitably alarmist, but still terribly predictable. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy will push for both more abstinence, and higher rates of contraceptive usage among the unmarried. They will call for less complacency and more parental involvement.[2]  Planned Parenthood took the occasion to bash abstinence programs while abstinence programs linked the rise to the fact that 68% of public schools employ contraceptive instruction, which has a 4 to 1 funding advantage over abstinence in the United States. [3]

I have suggested that the now mounting collection of narrative testimony from unmarried mothers might shed some additional light on the problem. Any additional light ought to be welcomed if the interests of children, and the poor (who are disproportionately handicapped by lone-parenting) are really taken to heart. This testimony exposes deep wells of gender mistrust and confusion between men and women. I have pointed out how, for example,[4] the women employ virtually no “morals” language with respect to their willingness to be sexually intimate with single men; at the same time, they are unwilling to marry these men, even after their baby makes his or her appearance, on the grounds that the father is unworthy of them and the child.  The young men and women involved do not think of each other in “parental” terms while their sexual relationship is ongoing.  The man even has difficulty transitioning to “parent” after the baby is born. Women are both more likely to articulate a desire to have a baby, and more willing to reorganize their priorities, schedules and finances around the baby once he or she is born; consequently they evaluate the man’s failure to do so, often referring to him harshly as “another baby” for the woman to mother.

One might observe here that the women have in a sense “found their way” – difficult as it is – in the midst of all this chaos; they are thinking maternally, even while they barely make ends meet.  Men have not found a way.  Often victims themselves of fatherless households and chaotic, incomplete education, with no prospects for a “living wage” in sight, the men are unable and unwilling to secure a wife. They rather drift into new sexual relationships and multipartnered parenting. Despite this seemingly endless pattern, particularly among the poor and minority communities in the United States, there persists the perception that the decision to continue to pursue sex without commitment is a “private” matter.  Although after the child is born, some single mothers feel that society ought to reward them– via generous social policies — for their childrearing efforts.[5]

Most of the state and private programs responding to nonmarital births over the last 40 years have poured their energies into “taking the baby out” of the sexual encounter via birth control.  Abstinence programs, which are less common, try to teach young people how to avoid nonmarital sexual involvement. “Big-picture” efforts have aimed to boost young people’s educational and job attainments, in order to steer them toward a different future.  While occasionally, policy experts have referenced the need to help young people think more healthfully about the meaning of their lives, including about the importance of their heterosexual relationships, no extensive efforts have ever been directed to addressing the intertwined issues I have surfaced above. For brevity’s sake, I would say these issues might be identified as:  the moral weight of heterosexual relations; the public nature of heterosexual relations; the intrinsically parental orientation of heterosexual relations, and the crisis of fatherhood.

Finish reading this article here: http://culture-of-life.org//content/view/598/1/