JESSE POWELL writes:

The New York Times recently ran a series of two articles by Jason DeParle and Sabrina Tavernese on out-of-wedlock births and single parenting among middle class whites in Lorain, Ohio.  “For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage” and “Young Mothers Describe Marriage’s Fading Allure” convey a grim picture of family breakdown. More than 60 percent of all births to mothers under 30 in Lorain County are to unwed mothers.

The city of Lorain is characterized as “a ragged industrial town on Lake Erie” and is further described as having “lost most of two steel mills, a shipyard and a Ford factory, diminishing the supply of jobs that let blue-collar workers raise middle-class families.”

 A few words about the demographics. The county of Lorain excluding Lorain city is 87% white but Lorain city, the main focus of the interviews in the articles, is 55% white. The children of Lorain city are 37% white, 36% Hispanic, 23% black, and 13% racially mixed (a child may be Hispanic and  racially mixed at the same time). Among whites in the city of Lorain, the Married Parents Ratio is 60%; for the county of Lorain (excluding Lorain city) it is 78%. In Elyria, also in Lorain County, the white Married Parents Ratio is 65% and 62% of the children are white. Data comes from the 2010 Census.

In the articles, we are told: “Joblessness and run-ins with the law are so prevalent among young men in Lorain that many women  interviewed said they had given up on finding a suitable mate. Angel Ives, a nursing student at the community college, said she did not want to bring another man into her family after her daughter’s father, a groundskeeper for sports fields, was jailed on assault charges. Ms. Ives, 32, works in a nursing home while attending college, and said she was too tired to date. She jokes that her idea of a perfect suitor is someone who will come to her house to baby-sit while she naps.

‘A baby makes a woman grow up, but not a man,’ she said. ‘I can’t imagine ever depending on a man. I don’t trust them.’”

Another quote:

“Many women described a lifestyle of dating in which relationships sometimes resulted in children, but less often in fathers deeply involved in their families. Judge David Basinski of Lorain County Domestic Relations Court, in Elyria, said he recently had a case in which a man who had nine children by six women owed $55,000 in back child support. Child support cases have become so common among unmarried parents that the court now gives seminars on parental responsibilities.

‘For a long time I believed it was happening among people who didn’t have that much money,’ he said of the trend toward births outside marriage. ‘But now we are moving to a much broader category.’

Several married people who were interviewed said they had wed later in life, often after having children. Pamela Noble-Garner, a nursing home worker who is taking stenography classes at the community college, said she married for the first time at age 37, years after having two children by two men. Her husband, a prison guard, is involved in the lives of his own previous children, a quality that drew her to him. Ms. Noble-Garner, who grew up as one of six siblings in a household run by a single mother, said her father was rarely in her life, an absence she regrets.”

Also from the articles:

“Amber Strader, 27, was in an on-and-off relationship with a clerk at Sears a few years ago when she found herself pregnant. A former nursing student who now tends bar, Ms. Strader said her boyfriend was so dependent that she had to buy his cigarettes. Marrying him never entered her mind. ‘It was like living with another kid,’ she said.

When a second child, with a new boyfriend, followed three years later — her birth control failed, she said — her boyfriend, a part-time house painter, was reluctant to wed.

Ms. Strader likes the idea of marriage; she keeps her parents’ wedding photo on her kitchen wall and says her boyfriend is a good father. But for now marriage is beyond her reach.

‘I’d like to do it, but I just don’t see it happening right now,’ she said. ‘Most of my friends say it’s just a piece of paper, and it doesn’t work out anyway.’”

It is as if these women don’t understand where babies come from. They put no effort toward trying to discern whether a man is “husband material” before choosing to have sex with him. But then why would they? They have grown up in the Era of Sexual Enlightenment. As for the men, criminality and pathetic weakness are portrayed as being commonplace.

One would think that all of this would be unsettling  to even the most liberal sensibilities. But feminists assure us that there is nothing to worry about here. They specifically take issue with the “negative spin” on single motherhood.

From Katie Roiphe, writing at Slate, we have, “More Single Moms. So What: The New York Times condescends to single moms.”

Says Roiphe: “Conservatives will no doubt be elaborately hysterical over the breakdown of morals among the women of Lorain, but . . . one has to recognize that marriage is very rapidly becoming only one way to raise children. (And other countries are obviously way ahead of the United States in incorporating a rational recognition of the vicissitudes of love, and the varieties of family life, into cultural attitudes toward unmarried parents.)” Roiphe then goes on to characterize single mothers as “these independent-minded, apparently hard-working women [who] are making decisions and forging families, after thinking clearly about their situation.” Finally, she asserts:

“Even people who are certain that the children of single mothers are always and forever doomed to a compromised existence, are going to have to await more information about a world in which these kids are not considered illegitimate or unconventional or outsiders, where the sheer number of them redefines and refreshes our ideas of family.”

“This is a new world, and there are no studies or professors from Bowling Green State University, or subtly condescending New York Times reporting, that can tell us what it will be like for these children to live in it.”

Another feminist at Slate also weighs in with the even more in-your-face headline “I Want To Be My Kid’s Only Parent” The subtitle is, “I crave the closeness of single motherhood – without the complications a husband can  bring.”

This piece by Jessica Olien elicits a more sympathetic response as it is a more personal story detailing the author’s history and her reasoning behind planning to someday be a single mother. Olien’s maternal grandmother and mother raised her. Though Olien’s own parents were married at the time she was born her father disappeared very early in her life. Olien’s maternal grandmother was herself twice divorced and was always available to help her daughter (Olien’s mother) in raising Olien. Olien says in the article “I’ve realized recently that when I picture myself with my own child, there’s no father in the frame. I imagine it being just the two of us—a team, like my mom and me. Perhaps because of how I was raised and how happy my childhood was, I often wonder whether I wouldn’t rather just have a kid alone.”

Olien is a 30-year-old woman with a college education. She relates: “I feel apprehensive at the idea of sharing parenthood with another person. Having never experienced the traditional family unit, raising a kid in tandem with someone is as difficult for me to imagine as having another set of limbs. I can’t help but think that having a partner there with an equal stake in the matter would complicate the process.” Giving us some more of her family background she states “My mother was born in 1956, at the tail end of a generation that grew into adulthood during the ‘60s and ‘70s. It is the first generation in which divorce was a prominent, even accepted state of being. Children born of that generation, like me, are the first to have grown up without the stigma of divorce or having one parent. Now that we’re having our own children, we have an entirely different perception of what a family unit consists of. There is a large cohort of people now in their 20s and 30s for whom a healthy family can mean one parent along with a supportive base of friends and relatives.”

Jessica Olien is totally unprepared to be a wife or to play the role of mother in the context of a marriage. She maintains that single motherhood worked out for her, though it clearly has incapacitated her from forming a relationship of trust with a man and probably from producing more than one child from one man. She views men as useful, there to provide her with a child and brief relationship but nothing more.

This idea of being a single mother “with a supportive base of friends and relatives” is not unique to Jessica Olien. Just a couple of days before the Times ran its articles on illegitimacy in Lorain, Ohio, it hosted a “debate” with the headline “Family Ties, Without Tying the Knot.“

The theme is that notions of family should be extended to any arrangements that adults want to put together. Marriage should not be privileged above any contractually determined arrangement that adults choose. It’s an extreme libertarian version of family life through contract. As Laura Rosenbury puts it in her essay “Think Beyond  the Marital Ideal:” “So consider a more radical thought experiment: Let’s take the current marital package of benefits, obligations and default rules, and let individuals choose whether to assign it to one person or to diversify (like a stock portfolio). Individuals could extend default property rules to people with whom they’re living (spouses or otherwise), health insurance to a noncohabitating friend or lover, hospital visitation rights to another and Family and Medical Leave Act care to siblings. How might that better support people living both within and outside of marriage? And how might it help us imagine new forms of life beyond the marital ideal?”

“New forms of life beyond the marital ideal.”

 Evidence that these “new forms of life” are toxic to the next generation are not addressed.

In the Times articles on Lorain, Ohio we see a more advanced stage of family breakdown among previously high functioning demographics. What is the cultural response to the rise in illegitimacy among middle class whites? The response is to glorify it, legitimize it, and promote it.

— Comments —

Laura writes:

The Times gives only passing notice to one of the major factors behind single motherhood: government welfare payments. The first of the two articles includes this:

Others noted that if they married, their official household income would rise, which could cost them government benefits like food stamps and child care. W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, said other government policies, like no-fault divorce, signaled that “marriage is not as fundamental to society” as it once was.

White women in large numbers have discovered what black women already knew: that they can trade their dependence on a man for dependence on the government. The first Times piece reports:

“Women used to rely on men, but we don’t need to anymore,” said Teresa Fragoso, 25, a single mother in Lorain. “We support ourselves. We support our kids.”

This is baloney. Women are as dependent as ever.

All in all, the Times gives the impression of moral decline with no end in sight and no solution. This is typical of the deliberate wallowing in uneasiness that the Times delights in. In fact, there is a practical remedy and, that is, to remove all government subsidies for unwed motherhood.

Catherine H. writes:

I was particularly struck by the phrase [in one of the linked pieces], “And other countries are obviously way ahead of the United States in incorporating a rational recognition of the vicissitudes of love . . .” As always, the liberal mind fails to reach past what often is to what should be. Instead of seeking to raise ourselves to a higher ideal of virtue, the liberal will, at best, encourage us to drift lazily in the tepid waters of vice–because this is a “rational” response to human weakness. Former generations recognized that “a rational recognition of the vicissitudes of love” was called the marriage vow: a commitment of the will made in a time of strength against the future possibility of a time of weakness. It is only true rationality when we use the reason to guide the will in recognizing and adhering to a virtuous course of action; it is false rationality to submit reason and will to the tyranny of transient passions.

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