IN AN INTERVIEW in the latest issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Bristol Palin makes single motherhood look great. A baby is extra work, but doesn’t interfere with a woman’s independence. A few decades ago, popular culture celebrated the single young career girl, the Mary Tyler Moore or Marlo Thomas who got her own apartment presumably before getting married and settling down. Now that popular figure has a baby too. Bristol Palin is inspirational, not for abstinence but for the single woman who wants, or is compelled, to raise her baby herself.

Elisa Lipsky-Karasz writes:

… Bristol is hardly unhappy, despite her hectic schedule and lack of sleep. “I love my baby more than anything,” she says, which is obvious from the cuddles he gets. “He’s like a Gerber baby. He’s the cutest baby in the whole world.” Read More »

BRISTOL PALIN entered a new phase of celebrity last week when it was announced that she has signed a contract with a high-end promoter as a public speaker. She will earn as much as $30,000 per engagement to share her insights into single motherhood and sexual abstinence. Only 19, Bristol is almost assured of success in this new endeavor. Even if her speaking ability is modest, she is likely to grow in celebrity and touch a chord in many.  That’s because Bristol represents a new kind of woman who is looking for recognition and reassurance. 

Though the Palins are now wealthy and famous, this new kind of woman is neither. She is likely to have a high school education, perhaps a community college degree, maybe a couple of years of college. An interesting and lucrative career is not in her future. She will work for most of her life in jobs that are just jobs. Her love life, her friends and children are the center of things. She is enough of a traditionalist to reject abortion, but not enough of a traditionalist to reject sex before marriage.  That’s why she finds herself where she is. She is a mother but not a wife.

She is a heroine because she has rejected abortion. She is a loser because she has had premarital sex in a post-marital age. Read More »

ROBERT RECTOR has a good article at National Review on the statistics discussed here last week showing  an illegitimacy rate of more than 40 percent for the first time in U.S. history. He writes:

The steady growth of childbearing by single women and the general collapse of marriage, especially among the poor, lie at the heart of the mushrooming welfare state. This year, taxpayers will spend over $300 billion providing means-tested welfare aid to single parents. The average single mother receives nearly three dollars in government benefits for each dollar she pays in taxes.

… If poor single mothers were married to the fathers of their children, two-thirds of them would not be poor.

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ELIZABETH WRIGHT WRITES:

I just perused the Ms Single Mama site, and I’m amazed at all the references to men.  Who are these pitiful women trying to kid?  More than anything else, they wish they could connect with a man who would play the traditional male role for them and their children.  What else can be made of some of the articles?

How wise to offer advice on “when to tell him about your single mom status and when to introduce him to the kids.”  The kid(s), PLURAL, mind you!  Yeah, how do you go about that?  What a life! And the sad part is that these women go through these games of deceit over and over, since most men still have enough sense to keep their distance from these wonderful single moms.

Van Wijk writes:

When I was still a soldier (this was around 2004), a female soldier in my unit asked for my help in assembling a computer desk and TV stand at her home. She was a single mother with four children, and was around 7 months pregnant with #5. Read More »

RATHER THAN regretting her mistakes, the New Single Mother revels in them. She dotes on her little one, has sex with many men in search of elusive perfection, and publicly trashes the father of her child. She forms networks with other single mothers, who help each other normalize the abnormal and defiantly proclaim they don’t need men.

This bravado does not hide their unhappiness. Look closely and you will see. And, it will never give their children one of the things they want most: a father.

Read More »