1. My review of Isabel Sawhill.
Although Sawhill refers to these pregnancies as unplanned and to the children as unwanted, I would note that the mothers’ “revealed preference” is to have children. Not only do they become pregnant, they choose not to terminate their pregnancies or seek to place their children for adoption.
This is the fascinating irony of the pro-life movement. The cause originated as a profoundly socially conservative movement. Yet as it grew, it became less sectarian. Women came to the fore as leaders. It found a new language of concern and compassion, rather than condemnation and control. Most radically and decisively, the movement made its peace with unwed parenthood as the inescapable real-world alternative to abortion.
What I gather that Frum is saying that conservatives used to stigmatize unwed motherhood, and instead now they stigmatize abortion.
Will stigmatizing unwed motherhood make a comeback, led by liberals? I think that this is unlikely. I think they will continue to hold to a “no-stigma” approach toward women’s choices. Frum implies that the no-stigma equilibrium is for women to have more abortions. I am skeptical about this. My point in (1) is that the assumption that these are unwanted children is questionable.
I think you conflate “unwed” with “unintelligent”. If a 28 year old woman with a college degree and an income of $75K/year were to have a child without marriage, her child might be slightly worse off than a married couple with college degrees making $125K/year. Her child would be much better off than the married high school dropouts with three kids making $22K/year, who would probably be better off than the same three kids had the mother not married the dad of one of them and rather collected welfare–but not by a whole lot.
“My point in (1) is that the assumption that these are unwanted children is questionable.”
Yes, absolutely. From what I’ve read, while poor women do want access to abortions, they seem to want them because they have 3 or 5 kids already–not because they don’t want to be unwed mothers.
One thing that might encourage fewer children would be more financial support for young men, to give them help and encouragement in finding stability. Instead, we spend all our money rewarding young women who make exactly the wrong decision.
But in any event, what we ideally want is not more marriages among poor, low IQ women, but fewer children. This always sounds like eugenics, but if you support (as I do) investment in kids born under less than ideal circumstances, then we need fewer of them in order to maximize their opportunities. So you craft a policy that has nothing to do with intellect and give lots of incentives to poor people to delay childbearing and form families. And in some way, you penalize those who don’t delay.
“So you craft a policy that has nothing to do with intellect and give lots of incentives to poor people to delay childbearing and form families. And in some way, you penalize those who don’t delay.”
The Devil’s in the details. The trouble is we can’t both disincentive reproduction in bad circumstances, and also help take care of the children born into those circumstances and still leave them with the mother. Any incentive structure that accomplishes what you propose will look like it’s hurting innocent children ‘most in need’.
If there’s some acceptable way to help the kid and simultaneously hurt an irresponsible mother, then I’m all ears.
We want our cake and we want to eat it too. We’ve painted ourselves into a corner with this problem when we went down the path of the Great Society.
What would these incentives look like? Seems to me that they would all be made by the usual suspects to seem so cruel and intrusive as to be political dead-ends.
So, for example, are we going to have a tax return ask if someone is female, young, unmarried, and give her $5K or more a year, unless she has a child, in which case nothing?
I’d probably start at the high school or middle school level, and reward both boys and girls directly for going to school, not getting into fights or misbehaving, not going to jail, and not fathering/giving birth to children. if their parental income is below a certain point.
They’ll still call us horrible people for supporting a ‘baby penalty’. Remember, a lot of this is happening after the age of majority now.
But perhaps a clever way to get around that for teenagers is simply to reassign who gets the bonus upon the trigger of the condition, in a way that avoids fungibility of money problems.
So, let’s say you have a 16-year old girl living with her single mother. If she doesn’t get pregnant, she gets her $5K. If she does get pregnant, her mother gets the $5K instead, under the assumption that the new grandmother will spend the cash on care for the baby, but that the 16-year olds lifestyle will still take a huge hit.
But, I don’t that working past 18 or so.
… the probability that children born into the bottom fifth of household income will remain there is 50 percent for those with never-married mothers, 32 percent for those with discontinuously married mothers, and 17 percent for those with continuously married mothers.
I think its important to consider whether it’s really marriage that’s important here or whether marriage is simply a proxy for certain other traits that are really the determinants of upward mobility: deferred gratification and impulse control, agreeableness and empathy which make compromise and cooperation easier, leading to more stable personal and professional relationships, personal integrity, etc. If that is the case, even if conservatives could put the toothpaste back in the tube, it wouldn’t make much difference in the lives of those kids.
But as a non-bleeding heart libertarian, I am all in favor of keeping as many cash transfers within family units as possible.
“wanted” by whom, at what level of thought?
In the greatest contest of all, natural selection, a woman who expresses zero concious desire for a child, is unhappy at getting pregnant, but carries the baby to term and tries to raise it, even though badly, is very likely a genetic winner.
A woman with low prospects who chooses to exercise great self control and have zero children is, by the terms of natural selection, a genetic loser (though she may be a great winner in society as a whole.)
How happy or unhappy this woman conciously is doesn’t really bear much on this essential issue.
Don’t liberals stigmatize women’s choices when they disagree? The impression I got was that liberals thought Ray Rice’s wife was too dumb/intimidated/unenlightened to realize she shouldn’t have stayed with Rice. I’ve heard them attack women who choose to appear in pornography.
Well, in both cases, they often say or imply that it can’t really be a “choice”, because, who in their right mind would make that choice? So, maybe you’re right, they don’t stigmatize them, they try to cast them as victims instead, victims of a society that has coerced them into doing the wrong thing.
That’s a kind of stigma, too, though, no? I can see liberals blaming Hobby Lobby for women’s choice to have children unwed. “They don’t really have a choice when contraception and sex are controlled by men!”
Maybe that’s how it will go. Liberals will try to stigmatize unwed motherhood by attacking others and pushing for free birth control, the same way they stigmatize the obese by attacking fast food and pushing for calorie counts.
“The fast food conglomerates are forcing unhealthy choices on people, and that’s why obese people are so ugly and disgusting and fat!” Except they don’t explicitly say the second part, just the first. It’s still a stigma.
Frum’s article focuses on the conservative movement’s embrace of unmarried motherhood, but fails to note the liberal movement’s vigorous embrace of the shotgun wedding.
No, we don’t call it a “wedding”, and there’s nothing party-like about having the child support apparatus target you, but there it is. When a woman finds herself pregnant, she knows that if the father has any prospects at all, her pregnancy comes with a financial asset: him. She owns him as an income-generating asset – and we’re talking substantial fractions of his income-earning potential (as determined by “the system”, don’t even bother telling us you’ve been laid off), and jail if he balks or can’t come up with the money. She owns him, “to have and to hold” as the old property documents used to put it, for richer or for poorer. Shotgun wedding, statist-style. And that security has to be a factor in deciding whether the baby is “wanted” or not.
Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is surely situation-dependent. But it’s interesting that the “child support” laws get so little press in these discussions. I do wonder why.