Now that the Republican Consultants are waking up and seeing that marriage matters, the “Progressives” are reacting precisely on cue, for instance, with this story: “Promoting marriage among single mothers: An ineffective weapon in the war on poverty?” The Usual Suspects discover that urging people to get married won’t solve all their poverty problems. But when you actually drill down and read the story, you see that they are actually conceding a great deal to the case for natural marriage as the proper context for both sex and childbearing.
The reason getting married doesn’t solve the problems low income women face is simple: many low income women have already made seriously bad choices in partners when they had their first child, and before they get married. According to the definitive Fragile Families study, low income unmarried mothers seldom marry the father of their first child. When an unmarried couple has a child, only 16% of them eventually get married to each other and are still married 5 years after the birth of their child.
The bottom line of the Fragile Families Study (the big study at Princeton, not the ideologically-driven source for the NBC story) points to the significant role played by the decisions around marriage and childbearing.
Most importantly, none of these (including job training, tax programs, etc JRM) programs is likely to have a large effect as long as mothers continue to have children before they find a long term partner. Although wage subsidies and relationship counseling may ameliorate some of the problems associated with non-marital childbearing, they are likely to be limited in what they can accomplish. Thus, in order to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty, we will need to find a way to persuade young women from disadvantaged backgrounds that delaying fertility while they search for a suitable partner will have a payoff that is large enough to offset the loss of time spent as a mother or the possibility of forgoing motherhood entirely.
To do that, it would be really helpful if the Elites of this culture would abandon their ideological system that says that sex is a recreational activity that is normatively sterile, and the marriage is a trap that no self-respecting woman should have anything to do with. (Unless she is a lesbian, in which case, marriage is absolutely essential to her well-being. But I digress.)
The Ruth Institute is having a conference for the victims of the Sexual Revolution. People from any social class or background can come. Just have a sincere desire to heal.
