Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
I did not know that. Thank you!
While I see this predicament as a rather open & shut case for The Negative Income Tax (see the end of Voegeli’s latest book: PITY PARTY for more on arguing for that). But, another idea came to me on the basis of thinking of conservative policy solutions.
What if fathering a child constituted Common Law Marriage?
You could still get divorced.
I expect SpermDonation/EggDonation/Surrogacy/Rape would be exempted.
No one can buy a man’s sperm unless he’s selling. Thus, no man becomes a father except by his own voluntary choice to make that possible, either by having sex with a woman or by donating sperm.
There are lots of things in life that are out of a person’s control. Women can get raped and become pregnant. People may want to raise children and be infertile. One’s child may die. One’s child may be mentally or physically disabled. One thing that can never happen is that a man becomes a father without having sex or donating sperm. That one choice, to be in a position to possibly be a father, may be the one absolute immutable area of control that any human being has in life.
Don’t separate the action from the consequence. Sex is like a weapon that lots of people mishandle much to their great detriment. Those who have inadequate respect for the risks involved pay the price, often an unfair, “disproportionate” one. They might even be punished with a baybeh.
Thank you Lucy!
Did you counter them? If so, how, and what was their reply?
I quoted my mother: “People don’t change until it hurts too much not to.” For bad decisions to become teaching moments, you need some pain.
If someone makes a really bad decision, like blowing all the money in Vegas, he or she will have to rely on the kindness of strangers. He’ll have a rough, humiliating year of poverty and dependence made all the more painful by the fact that he’d have no excuses: a’ll his friends and neighbors had exactly the same amount to start with as he did. But he’d also have hope: the next year, he’d get the chance to try again.
Oddly enough, my liberal friends seemed most worried about food. ” They’ll forget to budget for food.” “They won’t eat the right things.”
Can’t we at least trust them to figure out how to eat?
In the end, I think I made a reasonably convincing case that the present system has so many built-in restrictions, rules and counterincentives that it is difficult to know what poor people would choose, given actual choices. But I’d be inclined to have a little faith ( and a lot of curiosity!) Framing it in terms of giving young black women more freedom and autonomy was a good strategy, FYI. In spite of all the Black Lives Matter stuff, young black men just don’t grab the sympathetic imagination of liberals the way (I think) they should.
I read of an interesting experiment in Michigan (I think it was Michigan) years ago. Just to see what would happen, the local government gave single mothers $10,000 in a cash grant–no strings attached. Every single one of them got a car, a phone, and job. They never saw them again.
I wish I could find that story.
I wish you could find it as well. I’d enjoy reading that story.
It’s not THE WORST idea to merely give the money away to the mothers.
http://books.google.com/books/about/Just_Give_Money_to_the_Poor.html?id=M2WWHIzQON0C
By which time the woman’s biological clock will have run out. Oh, jolly darn.
Aside from reasons so far stated, there is another reason that hasn’t been mentioned supporting more responsibility for the girl, and that is the difference in the human sexual response between males and females. Women/ovens take much more time to come to temperature compared to men/bunsen burners. As long as they are not being physically coerced, women have a much longer interval before they get to the point where they can’t control themselves. During which interval there are any number of things a girl/woman can do or say that will have the effect of instantly cooling passion in the guy. Passion in gents is also quicker to cool than for ladies.
Well, there’s a reason you use the term “single mother” all over this post. While some of the responses have not been so well-placed, I am with Midge that the responsibility here is for the woman to herself and her child, not necessarily to society. It’s about reality, not blame. You may have the right of way in a cross-walk, but a dump truck will still put you in the hospital.
I like the idea, but something for people smarter than me to consider would be the impact on inflation. In aggregate, if you create more money without creating more value, then the value of the money decreases. Obviously, $20K wouldn’t become worthless, but it would be worth significantly less. One could see this as a sneaky way of getting rid of the welfare state, but it could have other economic repercussions.
-E
That is totally believable, and a money saver to boot. But it may have worked just because it was not expected and not going to happen again.
I have found the crosswalk analogy interesting. Pedestrians do have to be more careful, as drivers can be careless. If the driver runs over that pedestrian, even if by accident, that person still bears some responsibility for altering that other person’s life. They may not have been trying to run someone over, but if they had been paying better attention the situation could have been avoided just as well. Also, if that pedestrian gets run over do we all just stand by, watch it happen, and offer no assistance? That is a more dire situation of life and death, but the rise in single mothers is a dire situation for our society and cannot be wished away.
There has been much discussion of responsibility falling to the woman because of her biology. I concede that because a woman has to bear the pregnancy and carry it to term she does face the brunt of the consequences. But since when do we live our lives solely based on biology? Where is the moral component? Abortion and birth control have seemingly placed the power (and therefore the responsibility) entirely in the mother’s hands, with the result that the father of the child can claim no moral responsibility and still live with himself when he abandons the child. I think we need to take a moment to think about the consequences to the child, who is going to grow up and be the next generation. How do we create the environment where both that mother and child have more opportunity to make the best of the difficult situation they are in?
I do not believe that we have to accept the society that birth control and abortion have wrought. Making a change is going to require Conservatives to work at all levels. It starts in our own homes when we raise our children (both sons and daughters) with a sense of personal responsibility. Our communities through private and church organizations can give people a hand up, not a hand out. We can vote for local and state politicians who will be most likely to implement Conservative economic and education policy. Lastly, we can vote for politicians at the federal level who support reforming the welfare system.
Welcome to Ricochet, Luke!
Welcome to Ricochet, VS!
Hell of a conversation here. I don’t have much to add but am reading/following with great interest.
Thank you for the welcome! It has been edifying to hear thoughts on this subject from across the conservative spectrum.
The symmetric question to ask is if it’s impermissible not to offer assistance, or in other words, is it required that everyone help someone in need or is it up to the individual?
I believe it’s the latter, but I also believe the vast majority of people would help someone in need if they reasonably conclude the state isn’t going to jump in to help!
Now, this doesn’t mean there isn’t a politically expedient answer that would lead to better outcomes and less forced charity, but we should acknowledge that having the government do something like this is not really analogous to an individual offering assistance.
We would if there were an epidemic of people hurling themselves in front of cars with an indecipherable mixture of motives.
“Good bounce. Points for style. Not my problem.”
What Mike said. If there are helpful helicopters hovering over each intersection, we’d just as soon be on our way.
Gotta get to work, pay for all that jet fuel.
There is no longer a relationship between sex and children. It is not true. Whether sex turns into children is 100% a woman’s choice. This is enshrined and settled, and not going to change. The ship has sailed and it isn’t coming back. Until you deal seriously with the world as it is, you will continue to lose influence.
Seemed to me she had a point, that somewhere there had to be some cooperation from a man. You didn’t explain why that is not true or why it doesn’t matter. Just pounded on the table and shouted.
I think what you mean is, although there has to be cooperation from the man, he may very well be misled by the woman as to what he is cooperating in?
Women are the sole deciders, them and them alone, as a legal moral and ethical matter, on whether or not sex turns into children.
Consent to sex is no longer in any sense of the language consent to being a parent, for either party. This is not seriously disputable.
It may have been different in a world in which I never existed, but it isn’t now, nor will it at any time that I will be alive. This world which does not exist, has absolutely no applicability to any human being who exists in this world today, and is nothing more than a fiction. As desirable as a world you believe it to be, it is a fiction.
You can say it ought to be as it was, that’s fine. That it isn’t nonsense. It may even be a worthwhile endeavor. But you don’t start social change by making desirable behavior untenable because of nonsense.
There is a conceivable future where women can’t even get men to have sex with them. In fact there is a place on this planet right now, where women clamped their legs tighter than a bankvault and….. nobody cared. How is marriage going to work in that world? (Not well according to all accounts).
So, the problem for so-cons is you need to deal seriously with the separation between sex and children, and figure out how you get people to engage in desirable behavior. The simple and easy answer is to stop paying for undesirable behavior.
There is not a woman alive who has borne a child, except because she wanted too. Be it for moral reasons, family reasons, or personal reasons. The reasons are hers and hers alone.
I think we may be missing the issue a bit when we argue over who is more responsible for the pregnancy.
The source of the problem is that people are not getting married, not before the pregnancy nor after it. Currently the majority of women who are giving birth out of wedlock are in their 20s. In 1970 50% of non-marital births were to women under 20. Here is a link to a page of CDC statistics.
According to the CDC, in 2013 40.6% of all births were to unmarried women, a total of 1,595,873 births. That is a number we cannot ignore.
The lack of marriage, the rise of single motherhood, the decline of male investment, and the decline in male vitality in all aspects of life, are really the same problem, we pay women obscene amounts of money to engage in anti-social behavior.
The solution is simple. Stop paying for it.
Which is easy. Eliminate child support, alimony, and chasing down supposed fathers to reimburse the state for the cost of benefits.
This fixes marriage, it fixes single motherhood, it fixes promiscuity, and motivates people towards desirable behaviors. And deals seriously with the world as it is.
It also goes a long way in repairing the crumbling Expectancy, instrumentality, and Valence links in the male’s life.
There’s a kernel of truth here, but frankly, this is ranting. What may be more convenient now was never impossible just because it was less convenient. Besides which, the “100% choice” is ludicrous. It only appears that way when considered as if in isolation *after* the man has exercised his option to pass control to her. And somehow, conservatism survived eons of women having “all the choices”.
I’m sorry, but I don’t get you on this. You think it’s blindingly obvious, but not to me. I tried to guess what you meant and apparently guessed wrong.
Unless the people involved are not mentally capable, they ought to know sex can cause pregnancy. You can change the probabilities with contraception or surgical sterilization, or by having sex with postmenopausal women :-) , but you can’t make it zero. So consent to sex is accepting some (possibly tiny) possibility of pregnancy. The woman may abort the pregnancy before it leads to parenthood, which gives her more control than the man. But I’ve heard even that doesn’t always work. The only way to definitely NOT become a parent is don’t have sex, and a man does have control over that.
Again, I’m guessing because you aren’t explaining, but it seems you mean because women have more control over whether the sex leads to children, men have no responsibility for what they do control? By golly, I want my irresponsible sex and I want it now?
You can surely be sympathetic to a guy who has a vasectomy and wears a condom and she said she was on the pill and somehow she still got pregnant and he really had not signed up for that, but if it’s his baby, sir, it’s his baby. He’s a father. Change of plans.