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Single Mothers and Conservatism
I would like to pose two questions to my follow Ricochet members: What should be the conservative answer be to unwed single mothers? How should the GOP/Conservatives support existing single mothers (to include widows, separated, divorced, unwed)?
I think we have a tendency to focus on the origins of the issue of single mothers — such as the rise of the welfare state and the sexual revolution — without addressing how we would support those single mothers that need help today. Social Conservatives are pro-life, pro-motherhood, and pro-marriage. However, the Left perpetuates the stereotype that Conservatives are not supportive of single mothers, and it works for them politically. In the 2012 presidential election 75% of single mothers voted for the Democratic ticket.
So what say you, Ricochet? Should we cede that portion of the electorate to the Democrats and to likely dependence on the state? I believe we can do better than that.
Published in Culture, Marriage, Politics
The woman is not the sole decision maker when it comes to having sex. People use all manners of birth control because they know that pregnancy is the result of sex. The woman is now the sole decision maker when it comes to taking responsibility for the pregnancy because we have a throwaway culture where if we do not want to have the baby, we can just get rid of it. Is that the best we can do here? Is that the best way to look at women who end up in this situation?
With advances in nanotechnology and medical research, a male contraceptive or reversible vasectomy are not pipe dreams. I can think of no more urgent area for scientific funding and research. Think of the poor chap in Memphis that was in the news a few months ago – 30 years old with 31 child support orders. Each child gets about $3.23 a month after 50% of his minimum wage check is garnished.
Indeed. Nowadays one needs a college degree even to answer the phone and do some filing – if those tasks are even needed in the modern office.
Credentialism, inflation, automation, offshoring. These are the enemies of low-skill desperate people.
There are 3 groups of single mothers: the never married, the divorced/separated, and the widowed. Based on a quick Google search, and my personal impression that there are not many widows with young children, I estimate that the breakdown is 45-50% never married, 45-50% divorced/separated, and maybe 2-3% widowed.
Widowed single mothers are probably in the best situation financially. Their husband/father should have had life insurance, and they’ll receive Social Security survivor’s benefits for both themselves and their children until a certain age (around 18, I think).
Divorced (or separated) single mothers are probably much less dependent on government, and in better financial shape than the never-married. It varies from state to state, of course, but a divorced single mother ought to be getting child support from her ex-husband, and I think that’s the appropriate result.
I think that never-married single mothers present the greatest social problem. There is no getting away from this simple, two-part rule:
As discussed by many on this thread, welfare and other programs subsidize never-married single motherhood. Also, in many ways, current policies tax marriage (or have the same result, from an incentive standpoint, by taking away welfare benefits in the event of marriage).
Here are some things that we could do:
1: Eliminate the “marriage penalty” in the tax code, and perhaps even offer greater tax benefits to marriage or other legal incentives.
2: Make divorce more difficult.
3: Repeal the overtime provisions of the FLSA, so that employers and single mothers have greater flexibility in scheduling.
Now, I don’t think that this is going to win a bunch of votes for conservatives from single mothers, but these are a few concrete steps that would help.
Midge, while I think he was too crude for Ricochet (e.g. “spread her legs”) I think the underlying point is correct. I inferred from Kay’s remarks that those cases and those motivations were relevant both to the modern era and to this discussion in particular.
Unfortunately, contraception changed the landscape for everybody, not only those who use it. With contraception, these older norms are now almost entire gone among the poor:
Again, this assumes men have a choice on their relationship with their children.
Yes, this is a result of the sexual revolution and conservatives are going to have to deal seriously with this change beyond wishing it wasn’t so, but sex and parenthood are not linked anymore, and the question on the second point is entirely the lady’s decision.
Yes, but unless there’s rape involved, that one young man wouldn’t impregnate anyone who didn’t let him. So why are girls letting him?
I agree that both parties are morally responsible. However, I also believe that the female has more practical responsibility if only because she stands to pay a higher price and carry more of the burden through biology alone.
Yes pedestrians have the right of way while crossing the street and drivers should be careful, but the fact is that a collision will disproportionately affect the pedestrian. So it behooves the pedestrian to be more careful than his technical burden would suggest.
Please see my answer above.
I’m not sure I buy your answer that women don’t hold the cards. If you mean that scuzzy men will stop pursuing them if women try to bargain, then so much the better for those women and the children they won’t have. Of course they can refuse sex. And they should refuse sex too in those circumstances.
Did you watch the video that was linked a couple pages back? We are dealing with people who operate in the present moment. They are not future thinkers.
Is it your opinion that contraception changed nothing in the relationship between men and women?
Once the young girls is already pregnant, yes, it can be unhelpful, because it risks being confused with yet another useless blame-game. It’s most helpful before any pregnancy occurs – heck, before sexual intimacy of any kind occurs.
Enforcing sexual boundaries, whether the boundary is abstaining from sex entirely or demanding that no premarital act occurs without reliable contraception, is hard to do at the last minute, perhaps especially for girls, who tend to be more people-pleasing than boys are. (“I lost my virginity because I thought my boyfriend needed cheering up” is a stereotype because it happens.) So girls need to know ahead of time that the fact that their bodies would bear the brunt of any resultant pregnancy puts a lot of the burden of enforcing sexual boundaries on them, and plan accordingly. (It’s easier to tell a guy, “No, you can’t take my pants off,” if you’ve already rehearsed that refusal in your head. It sounds stupid, but it’s true.)
Ed’s remark about pedestrians vs cars is spot-on. Of course drivers should be careful to watch out for pedestrians. But it’s in pedestrians’ own interest to be extra-careful to watch out for cars. We can believe that and still refrain from uselessly guilt-tripping car-struck pedestrians.
There is an interesting article in Slate, of all places, that grudgingly acknowledges that conservatives are right about the role of culture in the destruction of the family among the poor.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/03/16/our_kids_culture_helped_kill_the_two_parent_family_and_liberals_shouldn.html
The author makes a claim I think needs to be challenged:
I think it was a bad trade. Women gave up a lot of power by embracing contraception, and divorce too.
How do you figure that? The father doesn’t have any control over the actions of his completely autonomous private parts? I don’t think so. If he chooses to have sex with a woman, he chooses to take the responsibility for any possible children that result. The pretense that contraceptives are 100% effective have allowed men to pretend otherwise, but this should be the calculation.
It’s a good thing fathers have been brought into the discussion, but not good that the focus is on prying money out of them.
Ideally, social pressure aka “judgmentalism” should support the two parents raising the child together. All this talk of “single mothers” when there’s usually a father out there somewhere does not paint the full picture. Mister 31 Babymamas may be a heel, but even a guy like that might have seen things differently and modified his behavior if his children needed him to survive. I think the babymamas would, too.
When the government substitutes for the father (and maybe more dependable and less of an imposition than the father), it lets both parents off the hook in the short term but they and their child suffer long term. The government takes away the father’s incentive to accept the inconvenient demands of being needed, and it takes away the mother’s need to gratefully rely on and accommodate the father. But really, children need a father, mothers need their child’s father for more than occasional checks, and fathers need to be needed.
Maybe he means, women can choose abortion.
Welfare funds stasis, inertia, boredom. Is it possible to fund movement?
I had a Ricochet conversation with Barfly shortly after I’d watched a program on the negative income tax. It had never occurred to me before that you could “do welfare” any way other than the way it’s done (See the thread “How Can You Not Know This?” for explanation and apology).
Barfly is excited about a Guaranteed Basic Income as a replacement for all welfare programs, and provided to all citizens regardless of income. I’ve gotten pretty excited about it, too.
What if the GOP candidate declared: ” Franklin Roosevelt said in his 1935 State of the Union speech that “continued dependence on government support induces spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”
“My fellow Americans, I don’t think anyone has ever put it much better than that. I believe it is healthier and more dignified for a man or woman to receive a check because they are a citizen of the United States than to receive all these patronizing programs and “services” as if they were merely pathetic, incapable victims. I believe that all people are capable of making decisions for themselves and their families, and deserve to be given the power and responsibility to improve their own lives. So we are going to eliminate welfare completely. No more [list programs] no more bureaucrats and social workers and intrusive regulations. Just 20 grand a year for everybody eighteen and older. Rich, poor, black, white: If you are a citizen of this great country, we will make this annual investment in you.”
You know what all my liberal friends said when I ran this by them? “They’ll make bad decisions.” In other words, poor people need rich (white?) liberals to run their lives.
An inner city girl whose ambitions have been narrowed down to “having a baby and going on welfare” might find her imagination stimulated by the idea that, upon turning eighteen, she will have not welfare but capital. She could go somewhere and do something: Buy a car and move to a city where there are jobs. Team up with her friends and get an apartment in a neighborhood with fewer scary people around. Go to college, or a training program for something she’s interested in
If she does have a kid, this young woman will have sufficient financial support to choose against abortion…but since the amount doesn’t increase, she won’t be rewarded for having more kids. And rather than penalize her for marrying the father, a GBI would reward marriage, since even an unemployed man would have something (his own GBI) to bring to the table. If he were to get a job, even a part-time or low-paying job, this would represent a welcome improvement in the family situation, and could be a source of self-esteem and pride.
And a GBI would allow for mobility, so people could either move to where the jobs are, or move to where it is possible to live on the GBI without working. The latter might still be lazy slobs, but at least they’d be creating demand for housing, goods and services in otherwise depressed areas.
For working families, it could help mothers stay home with their small children, or pay for daycare so they can keep working (no government funded daycare centers required!). It could cover health insurance premiums, or allow working people to pay directly for medical care while carrying inexpensive coverage for real catastrophes. It would give everybody at least some access to credit, because banks would know they had a good chance of being re-paid (and there would always be income to garnish).
Churches and charities could persuade the wealthier among us to donate some or all of our GBI and then they would look after the people who had, say, squandered all their money on heroin. They would have the right, as private institutions, to demand and enforce improvements in their clients behavior.
The notion of paying people for not working is uncomfortable, even for a squishy former- liberal like moi. And it would only be an improvement if you scrapped all the welfare programs—not just because the new regime shouldn’t cost more (or at least, not much more) than what we’ve got now, but because the whole point would be to liberate people from the dependence and moral disintegration welfare creates.
I have to keep reminding myself that we’re already supporting people who don’t work. And we aren’t funding meaningful lives of happy, healthy comfort. We’re funding lives of enforced boredom, humiliation, squalor and meaninglessness and we’re doing it in an expensive, fiddly, bureaucratic way that’s reinforcing bad behaviors—like remaining unmarried, having more babies, and staying put in a place that lacks jobs.
But we really would have to scrap all the welfare programs for the benefits of a GBI system to be reaped, and I can only imagine how big a stink there would be if anyone tried to do that. Still, it’s fun to think about!
tried to edit, ended up double posting.
I’m sure someone has made this point before, but I’m not reading seven pages of comments to see; you get more of what you subsidize. You subsidize single motherhood, you get more of it. The reverse is true. If you don’t subsidize it, you get less. I’m sorry for the kids of struggling single mothers. The mothers can struggle til the end time for all of me. They made their choices.
There is no pretending, that is a 100% absolute fact. There is no pretending involved. Sex and Parenthood are no longer inherently related. Hell men aren’t even necessary. Women only get and stay pregnant because they want too. You can make a religious argument that she should stay that way but its entirely her choice. The mans opinion is entirely superfluous. Hell, his participation isn’t even mandatory. For a nominal fee she can buy a man’s sperm.
Can a man, force a woman to carry his child to term, and then care for it for the next 26 years? No?
<Drops Mic>
That’s all it’s about, always has been. Shouldn’t be that way, but it is.
Absentee fathers and enforcing child support have not been the focal point of much of the discussion. Many of the proposed policy solutions center around giving people more control over their own lives. A lot of the policy to help single mothers might involve changing small business regulations, improving access to education for both mother and child, and strengthening the job market in general.
Fair enough.
Elimination of state licensing for most semi-skilled professions like interior decorating, beauty work, and child sitting services.
Probably the scourge of the single mom’s existence.
Even though your cases date from another time, much of what you write still has relevance today, in particular about the unplanned (or semi-planned) nature of the pregnancy and about them not expecting their boyfriends to abandon them.
Even if you know all about how sex works, and everything about contraception, you can still be naive about men. In particular, you might believe their sincere promises just because they’re made sincerely.
I remember a fellow who promised me a trip to Scotland – and sincerely meant it at the time! Then he struck up an affair with another young thing and forgot all about me. Naively, I felt betrayed because I hadn’t gotten what he had promised me. No one had bothered to teach me that men in the throes of passion (or just after some strange) can in all sincerity make a promise to you, then break it later because their feelings change. They aren’t deliberately lying to you. They are sincere at the time, they’re just bad at predicting their future feelings when complications arise.
Thank God it was only a trip to Scotland, and not sex or a baby. Though, if I had been any less stubborn, I would have given him everything sexually, too. It took every ounce of stubbornness I had to keep my knees together.
If we want young women to keep their knees together, it might make sense to prepare them for just how much sheer cussed stubbornness that commitment takes.
And encouraging them to abandon contraception will help them keep their knees together, don’t you agree?
I’m not so sure about that video either. It’s plausible-sounding and well produced, but it seems a bit too pat and general for me.
Contraception having changed the relations between men and women is not inconsistent with arguing that the women still hold the cards if they want to play them; it’s primarily women’s behavior that changed. For the most part I see the sexual revolution as having done most of its direct damage to women – the increasing percentage of unwed mothers in particular.
Midge makes an excellent point about removing barriers to enter business. I wanted to point out that there is one line of work where no credential is required and good money can be made: vocational accounting. That’s a phrase I use to describe solopreneur bookkeeping for micro-businesses. One does not need a college degree to hang a shingle and do the books and financial statements for these kinds of people.
Wow, my mind is turning now. I wonder how I can help these women.
This is an incredibly important point. This is Bastiat’s Seen and Unseen. If we want to talk about the cases of indifferent or cold-hearted treatment of those who are outside the norms, think of how those norms have helped knit together communities and lives. It may not (it may) be a given individual’s fault that they are in a particular circumstance, but regardless, it’s probably not worth tearing down that which is right and good.
You might want to remember that a person is not permitted to work out of their home in government supported housing. I live in government subsidized housing. We have mothers in the complex who have problems finding child care. I’m not allowed to earn extra money by baby sitting. Another person was an Avon Lady, but was not allowed to have her customers even come to the property to pickup their items.