So I’ve been reading about the topic of unwed motherhood, and here’s my working theory: it’s all about the men.
I still have some more reading — a lot more reading, really, in lieu of research experience in the way a sociologist might have — but this is what I’m thinking: one of the core issues in the city, and elsewhere, is family breakdown. The percentage of children born to unmarried parents is climbing (the rate itself, that is, children born per thousand unmarried parents, has leveled off and even dropped slightly in the same way as the total fertility rate, expressed as children per thousand woman, has dropped since the recession), and, unlike the case in Europe, it’s well-documented that these couples are much less stable than marriages. The chances of a child growing up with both parents at home, when those parents are unmarried, are small. And, though progressives would like to think that children will thrive regardless of how many parents, in what combination, and regardless of the level of stability, are raising him/her, we know that it significantly impacts the child’s life chances.
[Look, I’m taking this as a given. I’m not going to dig out the research, and I think the “solutions” proffered by progressives — “there’s nothing wrong with being a single mother, since kids of middle-class single moms do just fine; the only thing wrong is society’s unwillingness to fork over more money on free daycare and other forms of welfare” — are just foolish.]
But fundamentally, when a woman chooses to have a child without being married, or without a marriage-like relationship with the father, I really think that the large majority of the time, the issue isn’t access to contraception, but motivation. In some cases, she’s pregnant intentionally. In other cases, she’s more or less indifferent to whether she gets pregnant or not. Maybe in some cases, she’s been conditioned to think of pregnancy as unavoidable (thinking of the girl who finds herself wanting to have sex but without contraception immediately at hand, and just doesn’t have the common sense to say, “no, we can’t have sex tonight”). Teens and young adults have certainly been told, in the media, by activists, maybe even in their schools, repeatedly, that sex is unavoidable and inevitable. We expect teens to resist the lure of drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes; we don’t teach them safe-drinking practices by saying that “we have to accept that kids will drink and do drugs; it’s a natural part of adolescence.” The zero-tolerance attitude is particularly strong when it comes to cigarettes and objections to e-cigarettes and other means of harm-reduction. But as far as sex goes, teens are often told, “you can’t help it.” And I think that breeds a certain fatalism.
Now, of course, there are plenty of cases where contraception, no matter how diligently used, fails. And my opinion is that anyone who has sex, regardless of the method of contraception, should be prepared for the consequences, and really shouldn’t do so in the first place if having a child would be intolerable. (I’d go so far as to say that this is a pretty good reason for keeping sex within marriage, but let’s set that aside — it’s not my primary argument.)
But, be that as it may, what can we really do about girls and young women who get pregnant without being married/stably-partnered? Our options are fairly limited. We can’t really cut off welfare, seize their children, forcibly sterilize them. Once a woman is, indeed, pregnant, the existing array of social services likely remains the right answer, even though this will certainly send the message to these girls’ sisters, cousins, and neighbors that having a child at a young age, without a father, isn’t so bad, really. For a middle-class girl aiming at college, travel, and an enriching career, having a child can dash a lot of dreams. If your life path was working at McDonald’s anyway, it wouldn’t be so bad to have a child to greet you at night.
Can we get these girls to feel inspired that they can be more ambitious? Look, there’s all kinds of interventions for, at least, black and Hispanic inner-city girls (not so much for poor white girls, of course). But at the same time, I’m not sure that these interventions can successfully communicate the message, “the world is your oyster, as long as you don’t get pregnant, and if you do, no amount of joy and happiness from motherhood can make up for the misery you’ll experience, and you’ll never, ever be able to make something of yourself if you have a child.” There’s a whole list of things a middle-class girl or woman wants to do before having children, so much so that it seems perfectly natural to marry in one’s late 20s but to continue to build one’s career, travel, enjoy being carefree for a good 5 – 10 years afterwards. Such a girl/woman is conditioned to see children as an impediment. But a poor woman who has children young and unmarried just doesn’t have the same perspective on motherhood.
Anyway, where was I going with this? Sorry, as usual, I failed to follow the “bottom line on top” dictum. The men.
Here’s the basic idea: you can be as punitive to an unmarried father as you like without worrying about indirectly harming the children. It’s my understanding (note to self: verify this later) that when a single mother goes on welfare, the state gets involved to demand the father pay child support, even if up to that point, mom was content if he just brought a package of diapers over every now and again. So let’s start here. I don’t know how successfully this requirement is implemented and enforced — what happens if a father doesn’t pay the required child support. And certainly there are plenty of men who just don’t have a job with sufficient salary to manage their child support obligations — but that doesn’t mean that he should get a pass. To start with, in such a situation, the state should intervene in the same way as with a mother who, in principle, is required to work — to put in the requisite number of hours in some way or another (and maybe 40 hours isn’t quite enough to drive home the point), even if she can’t get a job. The state could, alternatively, mandate that dad provide childcare, if he’s unemployed and mom isn’t, but would otherwise be receiving a state subsidy for childcare. Or send him to a dormitory-type job program (VISTA?). The point is, if you father a child and can’t afford the child support and mom collects welfare, the state owns you.
Oh, and “collecting welfare” shouldn’t be limited to just cash benefits — it’s food stamps, and housing subsidy, and daycare subsidy, and Medicaid and any such similar benefits.
And if you marry, then all these obligations are removed. (Granted, this requires a further step of enabling a household in which dad is around but unemployed to be eligible for welfare just as much as without him.)
The point of this is twofold. Partly I want every young man who thinks siring multiple children by multiple girlfriends makes him extra-manly, to think twice about this because of what happened to his buddy who now works two jobs and is counting the days ’til his youngest turns 18. And, of course, the bigger problem is that poor men are pretty lost (hence, the judgment by many poor girls/women that they might as well have kids out of wedlock because they boyfriend is never going to be marriage material anyway) — but if by means of multiple sticks we can force some fathers to father their children, there might be some promise for the next generation.
Now, granted, I haven’t worked out what happens if the women simply refuse to name the father, claiming “I met him at a party; I don’t know his name,” or some such. I suspect the best that can be done here is prosecute her for fraud if in some way it’s discovered later on that she did in fact know the father’s identity.
And, of course, this is all still in the category of “playing around with ideas.” And I still have to finish “Promises I Can Keep” and then reread “Is Marriage for White People?” which addresses issues of marriage in the poor and middle-class black communities, and then plunge into the CDC statistics on childbearing.
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