Dr. Morse and Father Rob Jack discuss the troubling new statistic coming out of Great Britain: for the first time since records were kept, more births occurred out of wedlock than within. The statistics show that women whose first birth is out of wedlock tend to have their subsequent children with different men. In those circumstances, the first child is at higher risk of physical and sexual abuse.
Please note that transcripts are auto-generated and may contain errors.
Transcript
Father Rob Jack: With us now is our Thursday favorite I know our favorite of many of our listeners on Thursdays is Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse. She is the head of the Ruth Institute, an interfaith, nonprofit organization helping defend the family and repair the damage of the sexual revolution. Her most recent book is called The Sexual State How Elite Ideologies Are Destroying Lives.
Dr. Morse, thanks for being with us today.
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse: You know what? You guys are my favorite thing to do on Thursday afternoon, too, so.
Fr. Jack: Well, that’s good to know.
Dr. Morse: The Feeling’s mutual. The feeling’s mutual.
Fr. Jack: I always look for and say, okay, what she got today because you never her and you think we got enough goofiness going on in our country, but you and your need it. Latest press release. You’re going across the pond.
Dr. Morse: Yes. Yes. We saw a report recently from the United Kingdom, England and Wales basically saying that for the first time since they’ve been keeping records, the majority of children born in England and Wales are born to unmarried parents. And so we thought that was worth commenting on, you know, here in the U.S., it’s not quite true that half of all births are to unmarried parents.
But it is true that almost half of first births are to unmarried parents in the United States. You know, which when you think about it, those are your younger demographic, right? People having their first baby. People having their first baby over half. Or are two unmarried parents here in the United States? So this is an important milestone. It’s an important tipping point, and it gives us an opportunity to really explain why the Catholic approach to human sexuality is superior to all the the more radically broken things that people are trying really now all over the world.
Fr. Jack: And in many cases, Doctor, it’s a case of they actually want to be a single mother. It’s not a case of sometimes them having that happen because they they had sex outside of marriage and became pregnant and then wisely decided to choose the baby. You know, it’s not the case. Many of them just don’t want to have to deal with a husband are they don’t trust them or they just think that they just they just need the loaner of a husband for a while to get what they need and then they can cast them aside.
Dr. Morse: Yeah. Yeah. You know, we’ve incentivized family breakdown in really most of the Western countries have done that to one extent or another. We’ve done it to some extent with our welfare programs, and that’s also the case with the the welfare state in many European countries as well. The incentives to get married and stay married are really not there.
I don’t know what their divorce law is over there, so I don’t know how that plays into it. But but we’re talking about when the baby is born, when the baby is born, there’s no union there. You know, there’s no stability in the union at the time of the child’s birth. So that’s an important marker that something that something is really changed in our thinking and it’s time to rethink.
And in my opinion, you know, and this has gone on long enough, you know, most of those children are not going to have an opportunity to have a relationship with their biological father. Many of those children, the odds are, let’s put it this way, when a woman has a child out of wedlock, the odds are that her next child will also be out of wedlock and with a different man.
And so that means you’ve got the whole phenomenon of multiple partner fertility going on, meaning that at least one of the kids in that family is going to be in the home without their own dad and probably with an unrelated, unrelated male in the household. And, you know, we know that that’s a very risky situation for children to be in.
Fr. Jack: Well, it’s also generational. I’ve noticed this a lot that oftentimes women who had their first child out of wedlock, their child or children themselves, will have a child out of wedlock.
Dr. Morse: That’s right.
Fr. Jack: I mean, and that’s really, really sad. I know of a couple of cases where this happens and you and you’re thinking, you know, why is that why? It’s you know, it’s not it’s not in their genes to do this. But they they would think you would think they would see that having not having a father around or being married was hard for them growing up.
Why would they then choose to do the same thing themselves?
Dr. Morse: Because it’s not a live option in their minds. For a lot of people, it’s not a live option. They don’t see it as part of their world. They certainly don’t see it in the media. Right. They don’t see it being celebrated and explained and presented as a as a good option. So that’s one of the problems. And the other problem and I know I’m going to get in trouble here, but I have seen it too many times.
Not so much single parents, but but divorced parents who I have seen so many times that the mother undermines her daughter’s relationships. The mother undermines her daughters.
Fr. Jack: Parents are notorious for weaponizing the other parent right now. I mean, that’s such a common thing. It’s sinful.
Dr. Morse: Yeah. Yeah. So that all of these, these waves of people being separated from each other, these ways of family relations being broken, and instead of people making an effort to stabilize their relationship for the sake of their children, we’ve incentivized more and more radical forms of family breakdown, you know, and so that’s what you’re seeing in the U.K. That’s what we’re seeing over here in the U.S. And and I just I just think it’s if people on Catholic radio won’t talk about it, nobody will talk about it.
So we better talk about it, Father, you know.
Fr. Jack: Well, we surely we should, because I like to I like to look at some of the papers from Great Britain. And it is interesting, you know, the British stereotype is not how the British people live. I can tell you that they their their level of of societal morality and culture is really not a whole lot better than it is over here right now. You can be married, but It’s it’s not, you know, sex doesn’t matter. All relationships are expendable and disposable, whether it’s a boyfriend or girlfriend or a child. And this is and and they freely admit it. I mean, I read sometimes these are commentary things on issues going on just in England. I haven’t looked at other countries, but it is it is clear they they see other people, even someone they would love or have a a child with as simply disposable and expendable.
Dr. Morse: Yes. Yeah. And so it really does come back to the Catholic view of the human person versus the modern view of the human person. The modern view of the human person is that we are independent, autonomous, freestanding agents, and that that’s what it means to be a person that’s fulfillment is to be autonomous and to be able to express your will and to and to do your will.
That that’s what the modern world thinks.
Fr. Jack: Why not? Because what it’s obvious is nobody has ever given birth to themselves.
Dr. Morse: Yeah, well, said. Well, said, Father. And you know, we’ve talked about this before at the institute. You know, I’ve got a political philosopher friend, Scott Yenor. We gave him a prize, actually, at our last summit that we gave him an award for the Scholar of the year. He has been following or studying the all of the modern philosophers, going back to John Locke and Thomas Hobbes and, you know, all of these people back to, you know, basically 500 years worth of Western political philosophy.
And what you see is the is the autonomous choosing self as the is the model for what it means to be a person and the childhood and marriage and love have completely dropped out of the social equation and all of these theories, you know, and so really Catholic Catholic philosophy, Catholic theology, Catholic anthropology, Catholic understanding of the human person the world desperately needs what we have to say, because our view of the human person is more realistic and it’s more humane.
Right. I mean, we think the human person is meant for love. That’s what we think. And and I’ll tell you, Father, I have said that in front of religiously mixed audiences many times, as you you know, the Ruth Institute, where we’re an interfaith organization, it’s not unusual for me to be talking to a roomful of Christians of all sorts, you know, kind of all in one room.
And I’ll come out with that statement. We look, you guys, we all believe this. All Christians think that the human person is meant for love. And we’re all sitting out there nodding in agreement. It’s like, wow, why doesn’t anybody ever say this? You know? But at this moment in history, it takes a Catholic to say the obvious The human person is meant for love.
We’re not meant for consumption or or contracting or choosing or, you know, think even thinking, you know, I mean, thinking. All these things are important. There’s nothing wrong with them.
Fr. Jack: Well, but you always need to. People for love, doctor. That’s the problem, you know. And exactly. You have a lover and the beloved. And that that requires the respect of freedom and personhood. And we don’t want to give up our own identity, you know, for some other person.
Dr. Morse: That’s right. And the idea that too much entanglement with another person means that you give up your identity or you give up your freedom. That’s alien to Catholic thought, right? I mean, our idea is that by being in a loving relationship with others, that’s where you discover who you really are.
Fr. Jack: Trying to grow in your humanity. That’s true. Dr. Morse, can you stay with us over the break? There’s another thing we want to talk about when you get back.
Dr. Morse: Sounds great.
Fr. Jack: With us today is Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse of the Ruth Institute. And we’re talking about the terrible crisis in Great Britain where we see that the majority of the children are being born not to married parents, but to single women. Dr. Morse, thanks for staying with us today.
Dr. Morse: I’m glad to be with you, Father.
Fr. Jack: You know, one of the things you point out in your release on August the 19th is these they’re gone movie stars. Why they get this kind of publicity. All they do is act being someone else. Most of them don’t have any kind of intellectual knowledge. They they have about enough intellectual capacity to memorize lines. And you mentioned here in this article from the teen fashion magazine, Mary Clare, that Mindy Kaling, an actress from India, said she is paying paying to have her eggs frozen is a perfect gift for a coed home from college. And this is how it is. She says, quote, I wish every 19 year old girl would come home from college and that the gift, instead of buying them jewelry or a vacation or whatever, is that their parents would take them to freeze their eggs. They could do this once and have all of these eggs for them, for their futures.
Dr. Morse: That’s so wrong. That is so wrong. You know, I mean, there’s so much wrong with that. Where do we begin, Father? Where do we begin? You know, first of all, what she’s counting on is that those eggs are going to be available at some point to have a baby with whenever, whenever you’re ready on your schedule, whether you find a suitable partner or not.
And she’s counting on it working when you’re ready to have it work. And it doesn’t always work, you know, it’s a technological solution to what should be a human problem.
Fr. Jack: And it’s clear, as you point out in the article, that this lady, Mindy Kaling, had two children this way in her late thirties and rhapsodizing about the process. And it was the best part of my life. It doesn’t say anything about her being married or anything about having a spouse or anything whatsoever.
Well, and if it’s really the best part of your life, why did you put it off until you were 35? You know, and why and why do you leave so many elements of it to chance? So and that’s the real heart of the contradiction. What I try to tell young people is, listen, what you need, what you really need to do is put as much attention on finding an appropriate spouse as you put into choosing your major in college.
You know, you put all of this effort and thought and consideration into what kind of work you want to do and what you want to study and what your life career is going to be. And you don’t think and you leave your choice of spouse completely to chance, right.
(Crosstalk)
Fr. Jack: Don’t forget now, you’re talking about many of these people now are getting 10,000 bucks because they can’t they won’t want to pay off their student loans. So I don’t know how well their decision making regarding careers is either.
Dr. Morse: Well, that’s true. But you see, the thing about somebody like Mindy there and these actresses is that is that these are your high end, overachieving kind of people. Okay. And they they many women have been put on this track and have and have chosen themselves on this track because they think, wow, I can I can have it all.
I can have a great career. I can develop my mind. I can you know, I have an opportunity for travel and intellectual development and and status and all of these things that come with with being a high performing student and a high performing professional. And those are the women who are postponing fertility for so long that their eggs go bad.
You know, and that their probability of having a child is starts to decline. So that’s who she’s really talking to. So she’s not you know, you’re not your person who barely makes it through college or whatever.
Fr. Jack: No, but they are still in the Teenage Girls magazine. So, I mean, they’re planting the seeds very early.
That’s right. That’s exactly right. And and the other part of it goes back to what we were talking about before the break, Father, which is that to have a child, what we say as Catholics is that the child is a physical expression of the love of the marriage of the mother and the father. And that’s why marriage is so important.
That’s what God wants for his children. That’s what God wants for every human being for you to come into existence as a result of the love of your mother and father. And of course, we know not everybody lives up to God’s standards. Of course we know that that you know that that ship sailed in the Garden of Eden, you know.
But but the fact is, this is what God wants for us. It’s not impossible. It’s not preposterous. If we don’t ever talk about it, nobody will ever stumble over it at this point, you know? So we need to be bringing this to people’s attention that this is possible. It is possible for your child to be the expression of your love, for your spouse, of your mutual love, for each other.
That’s what it’s supposed to be about. You get your freckles from your dad and you get your eyes from your mom. And you have the joint history of both families on both sides of the family. You know, all of that is part of your identity and who you are, you know. And so that’s what the Catholic view of things offers people.
And I just don’t see how you can deny that this is a much more uplifting, much more humane view of of human life. You know, and we’ve got to proclaim this from the house trips. Nobody’s going to find it if we don’t talk about it.
Fr. Jack: Well, and that’s a very important point, Doctor, because, you know, people are going to say no one’s ever told us about it. I used to deal with the seminarians. They would say, I don’t remember you teaching that. I taught it. They were thinking about lunch, but I taught it and so, you know, this is the case. We got to keep putting it out there.
That means we got to preach it on Sundays. We got to talk to the high school kids about it. We can’t shut up about this. This is this is a much better way of life than what these actresses and actors are pushing on us.
Dr. Morse: That’s right.
Fr. Jack: Dr. Morse, thank you so much for being with us today. And people want to see your Dr. J show or get your newsletter from the Truth Institute. Where can they go?
Dr. Morse: Just come on over and check us out at Ruth Institute dot org. Go to Ruth Institute dot org. You can find all of our properties, all of our sites, all of our online locations, which especially want to go to our YouTube channel, find the Ruth Institute YouTube channel, and subscribe to us there. We got a lot of good stuff going on every single week.
Thanks so much for being with us today, Dr. Morris.
You’re so welcome, Father.
About the Ruth Institute
The Ruth Institute is a global non-profit organization, leading an international interfaith coalition to defend the family and build a civilization of love.
Jennifer Roback Morse has a Ph.D. in economics and has taught at Yale and George Mason University. She is the author of The Sexual State and Love and Economics – It Takes a Family to Raise a Village.
To get more information or schedule an interview with Dr. Morse, contact media@ruthinstitute.org.
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