It's been weeks since the last one, so on Sunday, The New York Times Magazine featured yet another cheery, upbeat article on single mothers. As with all its other promotional pieces on single motherhood over the years, the Times followed a specific formula to make this social disaster sound normal, blameless and harmless -- even brave.
These single motherhood advertisements include lots of conclusory statements to the effect that this is simply the way things are -- so get used to it, bourgeois America! "(A)n increasing number of unmarried mothers," the article explained, "look a lot more like Fran McElhill and Nancy Clark -- they are college-educated, and they are in their 30s, 40s and 50s."
Why isn't the number of smokers treated as a fait accompli that the rest of us just have to accept? Smoking causes a lot less damage and the harm befalls the person who chooses to smoke, not innocent children.
The Times' single motherhood endorsements always describe single mothers as the very picture of middle-class normality: "She grew up in blue-collar Chester County, Pa., outside Philadelphia, and talks like a local girl (long O's). Her father was a World War II vet who worked for a union and took his kids to Mass most Sundays." Even as a girl she dreamed of raising a baby with a 50 percent greater chance of growing up in poverty.
How about some articles on all the nice middle-class smokers whose fathers served in World War II and took them to Mass? Only when describing aberrant social behavior do Times writers even recognize what normality is, much less speak of it admiringly.
According to hysterical anti-smoking zealots at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, smoking costs the nation $92 billion a year in "lost productivity." (Obviously these conclusions were produced by people who not only have never smoked, but also don't know any smokers, who could have told them smoking makes us 10 times more productive.)
Meanwhile, single motherhood costs taxpayers about $112 billion every year, according to a 2008 study by Georgia State University economist Benjamin Scafidi.
Smoking has no causal relationship to crime, has little effect on others and -- let's be honest -- looks cool. Controlling for income, education and occupation, it causes about 200,000 deaths per year, mostly of people in their 70s.
Single motherhood, by contrast, directly harms children, occurs at a rate of about 1.5 million a year and has a causal relationship to criminal behavior, substance abuse, juvenile delinquency, sexual victimization and almost every other social disorder.
If a pregnant woman smokes or drinks, we blame her. But if a woman decides to have a fatherless child, we praise her as brave -- even though the outcome for the child is much worse.
Thus, the Times writes warmly of single mothers, always including an innocent explanation: "Many of these women followed a similar and familiar pattern in having their first child: They planned to marry, found they hadn't by their 30s, looked some more and then decided to have a child without a husband." At which point, a stork showed up with their babies.
So apparently, single motherhood could happen to anyone!
How about: These smokers followed a similar and familiar pattern, they planned never to start smoking, found themselves working long nights at the law firm and then decided to have a cigarette to stay alert.
Then there is the Times' reversal of cause and effect, which manages to exonerate the single mother while turning her into a victim: "The biggest reason that children born to unmarried mothers tend to have problems -- they're more likely to drop out of school and commit crimes -- is that they tend to grow up poor."
First, the reason the children "tend to grow up poor" is that their mothers considered it unnecessary to have a primary bread-earner in the family.
Second, the Times simply made up the fact that poverty, rather than single motherhood, causes anti-social behavior in children. Poverty doesn't cause crime -- single mothers do. If poverty caused crime, how did we get Bernie Madoff?
Studies -- including one by the liberal Progressive Policy Institute -- have shown that controlling for factors such as poverty and socioeconomic status, single motherhood accounts for the entire difference in black and white crime rates.
The Times' claim that poverty is the "biggest reason" for the problems of illegitimate children is on the order of claiming that the biggest reason that smokers develop heart disease and lung cancer is not because they smoke, but because they tend to work so hard. It's a half-baked, wishful-thinking theory contradicted by all known evidence. Other than that, it holds up pretty well.
Finally, the Times produced an imaginary statistic that is valid only in the sense that no study has specifically disproved it yet. "No one has shown," the Times triumphantly announced, "that there are similar risks for the children of college-educated single mothers by choice."
No one has shown that there are similar risks for smokers who run marathons, either. There are probably about as many college graduate single mothers by choice (7 percent) as there are smokers who run marathons. And, unlike single mothers, smokers who run marathons look really cool.
If the establishment media wrote about smoking the way they write about unwed motherhood, I think people would notice that they seem oddly hellbent on destroying as many lives as possible.
Miss Ann once again takes apart an article in the New York Times. This is why we love her - her unflinching willingness to speak truth to stupidity.
Of course not all children brought up in single parent families turn out to be junkies or criminals and not all single mothers are so by choice (some women's husbands up and die on them) but why tempt fate by choosing to put yourself and your child in a position which has a very good chance of having a very bad outcome?
Basically there are two reasons that women do this. One is colossal irresponsibility coupled with the perverse incentives created by the welfare state. A young woman or girl can receive housing, food, medical care and spending money from the state if she simply gets pregnant without the benefit of marriage. She may even allow the father of her child/children (or any other man) to live with her in her state subsidized apartment and eat her state subsidized food and take her state provided money and spend it on drugs or alcohol or other women without the slightest fear of being removed from the dole. And every time she squirts out another bastard child the amount of money (in cash and subsidized services) she receives from the government increases.
That the girls born into such circumstances will almost certainly repeat their mothers' behavior when they come of age (meaning when they start menstruating) and that the boys will most likely live short brutal ugly lives full of violence are simply as eggs to omelets to these ignorant single mothers and to the government employees who enable them and glory in the wreckage of human lives they create because such misery justifies higher budgets and gives them greater job security.
The second reason that women chose the path of single parenthood is massive selfishness and narcissism. This kind of woman is not a ghetto dweller but a member of the middle class (like the woman whose father fought in WWII and took her to mass). These women never grew out of their little-girl fantasies of being a mommy but were never willing to make the sacrifices and compromises necessary to create a stable and enduring marriage (like settling for a man who is an actual human being with actual human faults rather than the perfect Prince Charming of their little girl-marriage fantasies). So they procure a sperm donor (with the help of either a doctor or a bottle of Johnny Walker and a wonder bra) and launch themselves into single motherhood secure in the knowledge that if things get too tough they can always appeal to their parents or the state for help (or sue the father for child support).
Again it is eggs to omelets to them that their children will have much less chance of having successful lives than the children of their sisters who got and stayed married. Because, after all, the child is to them not so much a separate human being whom they have the responsibility to nurture and educate into a fully functional adult but is really a pet. The fulfillment of those little-girl dreams of mommyhood.
I must say that I have much more sympathy for the first kind of woman. The third-generation Welfare Queen is living the only kind of life that she has ever been exposed to. She genuinely doesn't know that there are other ways to live. However the women who were brought up in two parent families who choose single motherhood because they see women on TV doing it and because the New York Times says that it is cool have no excuse and deserve little or no pity. They have chosen to direct their lives according to the advice of a source (the liberal media) which is guarenteed to give bad advice and their own life experiences should cause them to know better.
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