by Charles
A long article by Kay S. Hymowitz, but a good one, responding in part to the Class Matters series in the New York Times. She starts with a report by Daniel Patrick Moynihan back in the days when he was in the Johnson administration, and she guides us through a little history on the entrenchment of poverty in black communities. While the situation is a bit better today, it remains that 70% of black children are still born to unmarried mothers. It’ll take more than welfare reform and Bill Cosby to change this unfortunate dynamic.
Update: Over at Redstate, streiff unearthed some statistics on out-of-wedlock births.
See Brad Plumer’s response to the article linked in CB’s post here.
Thanks, Tim.
Both the City Journal article and Brad’s response are rather hollow and lacking to me, as I’ve come to accept that most of the issues being examined here are likely not political policy issues at all.
I found the article Charles linked pretty uninteresting and uninformative. Most of is just a tendentious and (in my view) wrong-headed history of social science research on children in unmarried families, full of claims like: “This may strike many as a pretty good argument for addressing the prevalence of black single-mother families, but in CDF-speak it is a case for federal natural-disaster relief”, presented without any actual evidence for the supposed translation. If I were deeply interested in the history of late 20th century social science, I’d think it was just biassed and tendentious. But I’m not, so I also think it’s boring.
What would be interesting would be some actual thought about what’s going on with inner-city families, and what effects they have, backed by evidence. There are a lot of extremely interesting questions in this neighborhood, like: to what extent is this due to the fact that, according to the Sentencing Project (pdf), one in every 21 black men is incarcerated on any given day? But I don’t see that this article begins to consider stuff like that.
Hilzoy,
Eh… more policy. The incarceration going on in the inner city is, in my view, completely unfair. (If drug laws were enforced as harshly in the suburbs as they were in the inner city, the laws would be off the books long ago.) But I don’t think it in any way explains single motherhood, poverty or any of these other issues.
Jonas: I didn’t mean that it explained poverty (at least, in any direct way.) But I do think that the absence, at any given time, of lots of men might help to explain why women are raising kids alone.
So, inside a month they’d all be in jail? Something’s screwy about that; no idea what.
Slarti: the same guy could, and probably would, be in jail on a number of consecutive days.
Oh — I took ‘is incarcerated’ to mean ‘is in jail or prison’, not ‘is sent to jail or prison.’ I agree that on the latter reading, this would be insane.
Hilzoy,
While the incarceration number is far too high, 4% does not seem like it can make enough of a dent to be a big enough factor.
Ah. Incarcerated is not a passive verb in this sentence. I knew there was something wrong with the assumption.
Epidemiologists distinguish ‘prevalence’, i.e. how many people currently have it in a given time period, from ‘incidence’, i.e. how many new cases get it during a given time period. If the *incidence* of incarceration really were 1/21 per month, and if each were sentenced to more than a month, then, yes, Slartibartfast’s worries would be realized.
…according to the Sentencing Project (pdf), one in every 21 black men is incarcerated on any given day? But I don’t see that this article begins to consider stuff like that.
I wonder what percentage of those incarcerated black men grew up in single-parent households, Hil. I saw some data at one time and I believe the percentage was pretty high.
There is something screwy but consistent going on with the data. The number of live births per 1000 unmarried black women has gone down fairly dramatically since 1970 (it’s off by a third, it looks like). But, as a percentage of total live births to the community, the number to unmarried black women has doubled. So they (unmarried black women) are actually having kids at a significantly lower rate than before, but their kids represent a significantly high percentage of the new kids.
Are there just fewer black women getting married at all? Is that indicative of causation in one direction or the other?
Wierd.
While the incarceration number is far too high, 4% does not seem like it can make enough of a dent to be a big enough factor.
But I take that to mean almost 5% (quibble – not 4%) of all black males. I bet a hugely disproportionate share of those incarcerated are between 18 and 30 or thereabouts. So the pecentage of black males who are at the age when people tend to get married is much higher than 5%.
Ooh, that’s an awful lot of fat fish swimming around in a mighty shallow barrel. Consider this for example:
Is it just me or does that have post hoc ergo propter hoc written all over it? I hesitate to accept that this would have been Moynihan’s view, because the man was no slouch. But apparently Hymowitz believes that the correlation Moynihan (apparently) discovered, between stable marriages and confidence in the future prospects for oneself and one’s children, implies that marriage is both necessary and sufficient for “faith in the future.”
She doesn’t seem to want to say it in so many words, but if she doesn’t think that then damned if I can figure out what the point of the article is. In any event, she does go so far as to dismiss Andrew Billingsley as evasive and implausible for declining to “view the Negro as a causal nexus in a ‘tangle of pathologies’ which feeds on itself.” So I guess we can reasonably assume that in Hymowitz’ view the Negro is the causal nexus.
Here’s another gem:
Hmmmm. So for urban black girls, sex education and access to birth control was increasing during the mid to late eighties? Because if that’s not the case this is a deliberately dishonest argument. I don’t want to do the research, so let’s assume that that’s what happened, and ask ourselves whether this supports the idea that marriage and family structure in particular are what’s needed, or whether it merely supports the idea that access to family planning does not impede teen pregnancy. Answer to that question, and question of whether Hymowitz’s premise about sex ed in the inner city in the late eighties is correct, are left as an exercise for the reader.
Just one more — they sure are easy to catch:
Ah. Well I can only assume that Kay speaks with authority about the feelings in the ghetto, because it would be a little presumptuous to have such confidence unless she spent a lot of time there. But if that’s the case then I’m surprised that some of the older folks haven’t explained to her that this story is about a hundred years old. Young black men have been vowing for a lot longer than 40 years to be the fathers they never had. And while it’s posible that their failure to accomplish that goal to Hymowitz’s satisfaction is inherent in black American culture, I wouldn’t rule out additional factors just yet. Hymowitz is convinced that having two parents leads both parents and children to believe that the future is bright but even a child with two parents will eventually notice that (to take just one example) their friends and neighbors pretty much get cuffed and printed sooner or later…
P.S. I, like Charles, would love to see some credible numbers for incarceration/recidivism vs. household structure. In case anybody actually digs something like that up, I will hereby go out on a limb and predict a strong correlation (after income and edjimication of course): inverse with the number of reliably present fully grown adults (this excludes teen mothers) in the household, irrespective of sex or relationship.
OK, more stats from the report I linked to earlier: on any given day, one out of every eight black men in his late twenties is in jail. One out of every three black men will be incarcerated during his lifetime. (Consider the effects this has on employment, and thus on ability to provide for any family one might have.) Moreover, in assessing the impact this might have, consider the likelihood that incarcerated black men aren’t drawn from the black population at random, but are to some extent concentrated in poorer neighborhoods. If so, obviously the proportion of incarcerated men in those neighborhoods would be higher. The report I’m citing says that in some neighborhoods in DC, there are only 62 men per 100 women (it doesn’t say what age range.) That’s hugely out of whack.
It also says that on any given day, one of every fourteen black kids has a father in jail (over the course of childhood, this would be higher), and that 13% of black men will be unable to vote in the ’04 election because of past or current felony convictions.
Preemptive note: I am not talking about this because I am trying to make excuses for anyone or anything. I brought it up as one example of the sorts of complexities that interest me more than Hymowitz’ faux history of liberal sociology.
“…70% of black children are still born to unmarried mothers”
This seems to me to be the least of their problems. More problematic is the fact that all black children in the US are born in a society where racism is still very prevalent, if somewhat subtler than in the past, where blacks earn about 70% of what whites do, where (if they are male) they have a 1 in 3 chance of being incarcerated sometime in their lifetime, etc. One of the stressors that frequently ends relationships, before or after marriage, is poverty. If fewer blacks lived in poverty, the rate of children born outside of marriage would likely decrease. I also wonder about the signficance of being a “single mother” in the current society. I’m not married to the father of my child, but we have lived together for the past ten years, are domestic partners, and have substantial family and financial resources. I don’t think that the baby is going to suffer much from having parents who found the concept of marriage disturbing enough to opt out. Perhaps some of the single mothers in the statistic quoted are in the same situation.
bernard Yomtov,
You’re right about my rounding error, and the likelihood that that majority of these men will be young. Thanks!
Radish,
Fascinating comment overall, and yeah, it is hard to figure out precisely what the author is getting at.
Using my personal experience as a guide, as I was in inner-city schools in the late eighties, I can tell you that it is this precisely that made the teen pregnancy issue completely baffling to me.
The sex-ed program, despite the abysmal nature of nearly all education dispensed within that system, was astoundingly excellent. The teachers were compelling and knowledgeable, and covered everything to preposterously detailed extremes (I distinctly remember some bizarre battery-powered contraceptive being discussed, that electrocuted sperm, that I have yet to hear of again.)
Everyone did well in this class, not because it was easy, but because well nearly any kid would pay attention given the subject matter and how well the teachers did their job.
For high school I went to a private school, where everyone had never received any detailed sexual education at all, and to my eyes seemed to be in comparison, well, sex-ed retards. Too many of the freshman children of the affluent elite seemed to be laboring under the impression that virgin girls couldn’t get pregnant the first time, a notion that had be thoroughly striken from us by the time we left inner-city elementary schools.
Now, guess between the public high school my old friends went to and the private school, which group of kids eventually were at risk of getting pregnant or making someone pregnant. Sad, but thats the way it worked out. In fact, the only girl to get pregnant at my private high school was a fellow inner-city transplant herself.
Why is this? To a major extent I guess it is a matter of parental example, which is kind of depressing. I had both parents together through most of my life, and they had waited until their late-twenties to start a family. They never said much of anything to me about what I should do in that regard, but that’s what made sense to me and so the notion of teenage pregnancy or absent fatherhood seemed absolutely unacceptable to me. Again, no effort was undertaken by my parents or anyone else to drill this into my head, but it was very firmly settled in. And for years I’ve been trying to figure out how that works.
Oh, one other point. Women still make less, on average, than men. If children are frequently living with their mother and she is unable to make a decent living due to prejudice against her race, gender, or both, then naturally the children will be living in poverty. A decrease in sexism would probably do more towards reducing the number of these children living in poverty than forcing or coercing young women into marriages they don’t want just because they are pregnant.
Jonas: Why is this?
It’s not much use knowing all about contraception if it’s then difficult to get access to it. How easy was it for inner-city teens where you grew up to get free contraceptives – get on the pill for free without parental consent for girls, get condoms/diaphagrams for free (and without parental consent or parental knowledge) for either girls or boys?
Jesurgislac,
Condoms were free and prevelent to the point where at a quite young age they found frequent use as water balloons.
As for the pill, I really don’t know. I’m not that bullish on the pill as solution to this, for both STD/AIDS reasons and the fact that one dear friend had her teenage pregnancy as the result of the pill’s mysterious qualities.
Now, guess between the public high school my old friends went to and the private school, which group of kids eventually were at risk of getting pregnant or making someone pregnant. Sad, but thats the way it worked out.
Call me a cynic, but wouldn’t you think this is likely a matter of differing access (financial, social) to abortion? I assume that at least some of the fellow students in your private high school got pregnant — they just didn’t give birth.
Oh, one other point. Women still make less, on average, than men.
When you adjust for length of time on the job, Dianne, the gender gap all but disappears. There is now a growing gender gap in post high school education, with a significantly higher percentage of women enrolling in and graduating college than men.
Although not directly comparable to the African American situation, one reason why Asians have mostly transcended racism is because of strong family structure.
Lizardbreath,
No, not cynical at all, sadly. There was one abortion according to rumor, but not likely many more, as that rumor network had uncanny accuracy verifying all the sordid secrets I was privy to.
Meanwhile, it has nothing to do with access to abortion – my aforementioned friend had, as did everyone else, easy access to it. The important distinction is that one group is more likely to take advantage of it, and one is not, and that’s the mystery to me. Heck, that one group is even going to need it in the first place, and one is not…
I wouldn’t put a lot of weight on deductions drawn on the assumption that you’d know accurately how many people in your high-school class had abortions, nor would I assume that your inner-city classmates had equally easy access to abortions. Just financially, an abortion means either coming up with a couple of hundred dollars, or successfully figuring out how to get an abortion subsidized by charity. ‘Nothing to do with access to abortion’, without considering the financial differences alone, seems unrealistic.
My wife made just about exactly the same amount as me when she quit working to take care of Emily. A couple of years ago she started working part-time, maybe up to 25% of the time. Last year she went to full-time, and she’s now making about 85% of what I make. If she wanted to go for the career fast-track, she could leave me in the dust in no time. As I’ve noted more than once, she’s a lot smarter than I am, and her occupation could be made to pay more, if she didn’t mind moving to another company or even another city.
CB: Do you have a source for your statement about the wage gap disappearing when you take time on the job into account? I have to admit my initial statement was made based on my memory of what the wage gap was, and it turned out to be somewhat off. In 2003, the actual wage gap was 76% not 70%, at least for white women. If you look further down the table, you’ll note that Hispanics, another group with strong family structures, have an even larger wage gap than blacks, so I don’t think you can credit Asian families for the relatively better position of Asians versus blacks in US society.
“Oh, one other point. Women still make less, on average, than men. If children are frequently living with their mother and she is unable to make a decent living due to prejudice against her race, gender, or both, then naturally the children will be living in poverty. A decrease in sexism would probably do more towards reducing the number of these children living in poverty than forcing or coercing young women into marriages they don’t want just because they are pregnant.”
I’m skeptical that a decrease in sexism would do much in this area. The main reason women make less in the modern economy is years of experience. Many women take off a number of years from their careers to raise children. This reduces the amount of job experience they have in their careers when compared to men of the same age. When you compare men and women of similar years of job experience, the wage gap almost vanishes. Since being a single mother would logically make it more difficult to focus on a high-earning career, I would bet it is safer to say that reducing single-motherhood would do more to reduce the wage gap than reducing the wage gap would decrease single motherhood and its correlated detriments for children.
“so I don’t think you can credit Asian families for the relatively better position of Asians versus blacks in US society”
But I would like to know if racism is a major component why Asians, Indians (the sub-continental kind) and Middle Easterners do so well?
CB: Do you have a source for your statement about the wage gap disappearing when you take time on the job into account?
My former spouse is an economist, and did a study on this, related to childcare financing. She found that, indeed, women generally make as much as men do on a skills and time basis, but found that in the aggregate, women generally end up making less than men because men generally don’t want to do childcare. As a result, women’s careers and education suffer in exchange for childcare that they do.
The solution, in my opinion? Government-subsidized quality childcare to level the playing field. Or possibly making the men do equal amounts of childcare.
LizardBreath,
It’s not social science for certain, but personally it was a small class with most of us staying pretty close. With all of our other major personal secrets being in the open for years, I’m doubtful… never mind that pregancy is a reasonably easy thing to avoid while sexually active if you want to.
The important thing here is that for those I have known who were teenage mothers in the inner-city, this was a completely viable option they decided against.
I have never personally, nor among my friends who have done teenage counselling, ever heard of anyone ever not having an abortion if they wanted one. The odd truth seems to be they usually don’t.
SH: “the wage gap almost vanishes”
Is that true in the groups under question? And is the effect clearly not a result of selection?
In any case, one way to react to this discussion would be to provide increased daycare etc in the problem neighborhoods.
Hmmm…Hispanic women make just under 86% of what Hispanic men make; black women make almost 84% of what black men make. Arguing a wage gap is fine, but let’s not mix the race/culture gap with the gender gap, ok?
“The main reason women make less in the modern economy is years of experience. Many women take off a number of years from their careers to raise children.”
And you see no signs of sexism in that situation? Women are, effectively, asked to choose between having a family and having a career. Men are not expected to make the same choice. If your postulates about the reasons for the gender gap are correct (I asked Charles Bird for documentation above and would like to ask you as well), then the wage gap could be addressed with high quality, low cost (that is, subsidized) childcare, more flexible working hours, encouraging men to take time off to be with their young children, and other such measures. The very fact that these measures aren’t being taken is an example of the continued presence of sexism in society.
Slarti I meant that the gap between hispanics and non-hispanic whites is even greater than the gap between whites and blacks. This seems to suggest that intact families, which are relatively common among hispanics, are not a cure-all for the poverty and prejudice experienced by blacks and hispanics.
Are you claiming women have no choice in the matter? My wife made that choice, but she did so with complete freedom.
The discussions of childcare as solution to gender wage gap I’m finding puzzling, as it’s making the assumption that no woman would want to stay home with their kids if good childcare is available. That’s not true, and I’m seeing far more men reducing their career ambitions in order to spend more time at home. Perhaps the gender wage gap will one day become a family wage gap, I don’t know.
I’d agree that the data don’t support that conclusion, but I’m not sure if the data contradict it. There’s more to the Hispanic wage gap than race.
Hmmm…this figure suggests that childcare is not the complete explanation of the wage gap. In fact, it looks like single women without kids and married women with kids tend to earn about the same amount, with both being well under the male average. Next rationalization?
“Are you claiming women have no choice in the matter?”
No. Are you claiming that there are no social pressures on women to regard childcare as their sole responsibility and primary purpose? Women and men have a choice in this matter, but women are pressured to stay home with their children far more than men are. For example, a number of people (friends, relatives, acquaintances, strangers who start conversations on the subway, etc) have asked me whether I felt worried about leaving my child at home to go to work. As far as I know, no one has asked my partner the same thing.
Seb (and Charles)–When you compare men and women of similar years of job experience, the wage gap almost vanishes.
That one statistic sounds like an explanation, but it really is something that raises a dozen prior questions.
What about the factors that go in to getting those jobs in the first place and keeping them? I’m a white guy who did well on all college placement exams and went to really good public schools (rural Wisconsin), and when I had to drop out of college and work, I had a tough time finding a job that would pay the bills just for me. And I had every hiring bias working in my favor. And even with all of that it took me 16 years and 5 schools to get my first college degree.
It is much easier to go to school and get jobs when one has a network of successful people around oneself who can help. No one makes it on their own. The inner city teens I knew from a few years back had fewer people to look to for that network and a lot more family and friends who required their help. It is so much more complicated than Hymowitz or Moynihan think it is, and their numbers don’t show anything but the correlation between economic stress and social stress. There is no clear causation anywhere in that article, just a number of assumptions tied to a statistic.
Dianne,
Are you implying that the social pressures are the primary reason why women tend to be responsible for childcare?
Nous,
Thank you for that, as you’ve pointed out a huge factor that’s being glossed over in this debate, not to mention ackowledging the complexity that is involved.
So, women are victims, here, completely helpless to resist constant social pressure? No, I don’t think so. Sure, our society has developed so that women tend to take the child-care role, but that is changing, although perhaps more slowly than you’d like. You can always choose to not have children, too. Isn’t it possible to buck the social pressure directing you to have children?
Are you implying that the social pressures are the primary reason why women tend to be responsible for childcare?
Well, I don’t know if that is what Dianne is saying, but what I’d say is that many women simply don’t have the option – most men will simply not sacrifice their careers in order to do childcare.
Many men won’t get down on their hands and knees and wash behind the toilet either, but that’s a different subject.
So, women are victims, here, completely helpless to resist constant social pressure?
Strawman, Slarti.
Sure, our society has developed so that women tend to take the child-care role…
That’s what she stated. Whether it’s changing or not is moot to the discussion at hand.
D-P-U,
The flip side of this is that most women are not particularily interested in a man who would sacrifice his own career to do childcare…
It sure is… 😉
“The flip side of this is that most women are not particularily interested in a man who would sacrifice his own career to do childcare…”
Huh? I wouldn’t even think of reproducing with a man who wasn’t willing to take his fair share of the childcare. And I’d be quite happy if my partner wanted to stay home and raise our kid(s). Apart, that is, from the concern that he’d get bored once the youngest got to school… Of course, I’m generally considered somewhat odd by both men and women, so I can’t really claim that this means that all or even most women feel the same…
BTW: Apologies to Charles Bird for my threadjacking. Honestly, it started out being relevant.
Slarti: I didn’t read anyone here as claiming that women are victims, unable to resist social pressure. What I do think, though, is that: (a) pressure to stay home with kids exists, and is disproportionately faced by women; (b) in addition, there are still a lot of men out there who either expect their wives/s.o.s to do this, or else feel somehow unmanned by the idea of staying home themselves, and so don’t want to (and this is also pressure; lots of women do not want to do things that are genuinely distressing to their perfectly nice husbands/boyfriends/etc., and I know women who have ended up agreeing to be the one who stays home for this very reason). This is not irresistible, of course; but then I’d expect the obstacles between women and equal pay not to be composed exclusively of insuperable obstacles, but of a variety of things that make it harder for them to achieve equal pay without being superheros, when men can get by without having to be extraordinary.
How so? Either social pressures are irresistable, or they’re not.
No, she said it was sexism. There is a difference between having gender roles, and having women be held as second-class citizens.
Dianne,
Well I’m odd too, so we should make sure neither of us extrapolates ourselves to the general population 😉
I wasn’t very articulate with that statement. What I was implying was that women do tend to find a man who is focused on their career to be more attractive than a man who is not – at least at first. Men, at best, tend to be neutral on a womans career ambitions. A woman who enjoys her career and wants to take it as far as she can does not tend to do what a man likely does in that situation which is to find a partner who is less ambitious. This all adds up to a bit of a structural problem.
Slarti–There is a difference between having gender roles, and having women be held as second-class citizens.
True, and the flip side of this is asking just what the functional difference is between these two societal positions. It is entirely possible for these two to look functionally the same but mean completely different things depending on one’s situation.
Huh? Married women with kids tend on average to be older than unmarried women without kids. That doesn’t contradict the experience = pay theory at all.
Oh man. This thread is bringing up a whole bunch of memories from about a year ago… it’s too bad Invisible Adjunct’s archives are incomplete.
BTW, Slart, you do know you’re playing with fire, right? (I believe you have the best intentions in the world, but you’re broaching subjects that are, IME, *extremely* touchy.)
Dianne
The gender wage gap isn’t isn’t quite as simple as CB or SH make it sound. See “Gender Difference in Pay” by Blau and Kahn (Journal of Economic Perspectives, Autumn 2000, pp 75-99) for an overview of some of the issues. Experience/job tenure is just one factor. Structural differences such as women’s access to various careers/jobs/unions also matter. The change over time that they show IS striking and encouraging – see Table A of the paper.
The timing of career interruptions matter as well – See “Early-Career Work Experience and Gender Wage Differentials” by Light and Ureta (Journal of Labor Economics, Jan 1995, pp 121-154.)
A related, but very different paper (doesn’t address wage differentials directly – more career choice) is Niederle and Vesterlund’s “Do Women Shy Away From Competition” (working paper 2005 – see either Stanford or U. Pitt websites for copy.) They do not address how much of the difference they find is due to socialization, but I don’t know how they would have fit that in.
Jonas: in re your 2:38pm anecdote (thanks for that, btw, it was very interesting) do you feel that knowledge about sex and contraception impacted the scenario in any way? That is, do you think that having been exposed to sex education at a young age made the inner-city kids more susceptible to teen pregnancy? Do you think it curtailed what would have otherwise been worse? Do you think it made any difference at all? And ditto, mutatis mutandis, for your suburban friends.
IMO, there are too many mixed fruit in the gender/race/salary level bowl to be able to come up with any generalizations. We can’t weight just those three variables; there’s also age, socio-economic background, education, and industry.
In my experience, one big factor in salary level is willingness to get more education/training almost constantly, and to change jobs and employers every few years.
Once you’re hired at a given company, the built-in annual salary advances – “merit” increases, “step” increases, “COL” adjustments, whatever they’re called – are generally going to be small percentages (2%-4%) of whatever your salary was when you were hired. Unless you can change to a higher-order job classification with a better base salary, you’re never going to get more than incremental increases, no matter how good you are at your job or how many more skills you bring to it.
This is where the type of industry/company you work for matters. Some companies do encourage employees to advance: they subsidize training, establish mentor programs, and have programs to reward initiative. But you have to be a bit of a risk-taker, willing to push yourself out of your comfort zone.
But some companies are strangely loath to let employees jump job classifications: if you came in as “Administrative,” you have to push pretty hard to get out of that salary category and into a Management or Skilled/Professional category. This is particularly true in industries that are very hierarchically-oriented to begin with, e.g. law firms.
If you work for one of the latter sort, you have to leave your current employer and go forth with all those added skills and excellent evaluations, hoping someone else will hire you at the higher category and a higher base salary. Repeat the process a few times, and in a few years you’re making nearly twice what you would have had you stayed at the first employer.
Single women with kids have enough trouble finding a good job (one with a decent salary, and benefits, and maybe even childcare help) from the git-go. Once they’ve found one, they’re not inclined to shop around. It’s too much of a risk. Also, they don’t have the schedule flexibility needed to do things like attend night school to get new skill sets and certifications.
Interesting conversation.
One aspect not mentioned (unless I missed it) regarding Jonas and his experiences both with inner city high school girls, and private high school girls and teen pregnancy, is expectations. Not people’s expectations of the kids specifically (although that also enters into it) but the kids expectations for themselves.
I would imagine that young women (and men) in a private high school for the most part look forward with a few plans for their lives… a good university education, good job prospects, networking with others to increase their chances of accomplishing their goals and so on.
Whereas many inner city high school kids may not have the same expectations for themselves… if their school even provides sufficient education to allow them to apply to a good college, there are also other financial considerations, lack of other prospects, often lack of expectation from those around them that they will go any further with their education… so they may feel that they have little to lose, and can at least look forward to being their baby’s momma.
Poverty, dispair, racism, classism, expectations, tradition and other things all take their toll on things. Fix any number of issues first, and marriage (or at least stable, steady relationships, on a higher scale than now) will follow along.
Implicit in Moynihan’s analysis was that marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children’s prospects.
If this is true, it sure would explain the apocalyptic attitude and romantic visions of warmongering within the Red states…don’t the Red states have high rates of divorce?
Everyone runs around throwing their hands up in the air over out of wedlock births like wedlock is any freaking guarantee of anything.
My nephew (white) and his (black) girlfriend have a lovely out of wedlock little girl – and a lovely home together. My other nephew has an out of wedlock little girl and my first out of wedlock great-nephew, Logan, was born today.
It’s not the out of wedlockness. Its the choices people make around that.
Oh, personal expectations are a huge factor, absolutely. And I absolutely agree with Cosby et al. who lambaste the urban subculture that calls striving for academic achievement “acting white.”
But, see, personal and cultural expectations aren’t always or only about race. About 15 years ago, I became acquainted with a few unwed, teenage moms (they rode the same bus I did) and the conversations I had with them just blew my mind.
Most of them were 3rd generation welfare teenage moms. Getting public assistance and staying on public assistance was what they knew; and had known since birth. With one exception, it never seemed to even occur to them to try for something else.
And it never seemed to occur to them, not for one moment, that boys would or should play a meaningful role in their lives – not even the boys who’d fathered their babies. Since the boys they knew were at best thoughtless and at worst actively predatory, I couldn’t argue their point. Saying “Not all guys are like that” was meaningless to them, as they were unlikely to meet the good ones, and unlikely to know how to have a long-term committed relationship even if they did.
As for their babies: getting pregnant was something everyone did; and their babies would be something that belonged just to them, someone who would love them totally. It drove me nuts to hear that combination of passive peer pressure and aching loneliness.
And those girls were all white.
I’ve often wondered since then what happened to them, and their children, esp. once welfare reform kicked in.
Suebob: Congrats to you and your nephews.
Slarti: Upon reflection, it occured to me that I ought to make the following statement: I am in no way accusing you of oppressing your wife and I apologize if anything I said implied that I was.
Charles: Thanks for the link to the CDC statistics. I haven’t read them all, but wanted to point out a couple of things that I noticed. One is that the rate of out of wedlock births to teenagers is going down, while the rate to women older than 25 is going up. This suggests that more women are deciding that they would rather not marry the fathers of their children for one reason or another. Are there any statistics on the number of children living with POSSLQs? Another point is that infant and maternal mortality is much higher (3-4X) in black women than in white women. This trend holds even for women with 13+ years of education, so it is not simply a function of poverty. What is that all about? Systematically worse prenatal care?
Oh, gosh Dianne, that was completely unneccesary. But I do appreciate you going the extra mile to avoid unpleasantness, even if I completely failed to pick up on whatever nuance there was that may have offended.
I’m truly not trying to be difficult, nor am I seeking to minimize or discount actual sexism. What I am doing is asking to what extent these pressures you’re referring to have any effect, and to what extent they have any effect that’s involuntary. Me, I’m an engineer. When people start talking about pressure, I start thinking about how you’d measure it.
And no, I’m not so naive that I’m completely unaware of the sway our culture has over us, even though (almost by definition) I’m mostly unaware of when it’s happening to me. Yes, as nous has pointed out, there is some overlap where this and “pressure” become indistinct from one another, but I have to think there’s a point at which people, as individuals, can elect to do as they please, pressure or no.
So I was annoyed by the whole pressure discussion, but mostly from the standpoint that it implied a kind of mass abandonment of responsibility for one’s life, which I really, really, really like to discourage.
CaseL: I agree totally with both of your comments. About the relevance of job mobility: absolutely. In addition, making the kind of job jump that makes your salary jump as well sometimes requires a willingness to relocate, and that’s easier without kids. (from personal experience: I had more or less reached the point where I had to decide: will I have kids by myself or not? And one of the things that made me decide not to was that at that very moment I got offered the job I now have, which required me to move across the country, and thus leave my entire social network behind. And I thought: it’s one thing to consider having a kid alone in a place where I have lots of friends who will, in a pinch, help me deal with stuff; another entirely to do it really solo, in a city where I know no one. So I didn’t. That decision made a five-figure difference in my salary, though neither the money nor the not having kids was why I did it.)
And about the women on the bus and the men they knew: I am reminded of when I spent five months or so working as a waitress in a biker bar, and as a result had a social circle that was completely composed of people who were a lot like I imagine the women on your bus were. Very poor, the high achievers among them made it out of high school, one minor disaster away from complete destitution, trying with absolutely heroic determination to keep their kids fed and clothed, and working with me in the godforsaken biker bar. Also, all white. Most of them were women, and all the women had kids; what determined whether they were married or not was, as best I could tell, whether the father of their kids would agree to marry them.
All the women basically liked men, but all of them also had this bedrock assumption that men were basically children from whom very little could be expected. I remember once, when they were discussing two people they knew who had had an affair, they blamed the woman, completely, without thinking about it, and the reason was (as best I could tell) that they took it for granted that you couldn’t expect men to be responsible, or resist temptation, or anything, but you could expect women to; and therefore she was obviously the one who should have known better. — There was nothing the least bit hostile, or even conscious, about this; I remember this conversation in particular because it came fairly early on in my acquaintance with them, and I asked them why they didn’t blame the guy too, and they looked at me with these completely baffled expressions, sort of as though I was a child who had asked some completely rudimentary question, like why the sun comes up.
And the thing was, I knew the guys in question — those who were around, at any rate — and the women were right about them. You couldn’t trust them not to drink up the rent money, or sleep with your best friend, or anything. I quite liked these guys, but they all seemed to me to feel somehow trapped, they didn’t know how, into a life they weren’t entirely sure they wanted to lead. And every so often they just sort of fled, and it didn’t matter of the money that paid for their flight was the only money they had, or were likely to have, to pay the rent with that month.
It didn’t help that the guys were mostly in construction or roofing or (in one case) laying highways — seasonal, sporadic work that had no security at all, and that they all felt bad about the fact that they weren’t (as they saw it) doing a good job at providing for their families. And there were all sorts of vicious cycles in play: it made them feel worse if their wives/girlfriends went on WIC, or went to a food bank; and when they felt worse, they were just that much more likely to do something that would make the food bank a lot more necessary.
Steady work would have helped a lot.
hilzoy–
“That decision made a five-figure difference in my salary”
Wow–I’m hoping that means you used to have a salary in, say, the high four figures, and are now more comfortably compensated somewhere in the middle nine-figures. Not the *high* nine figures, of course–nothing lavish. Just a normal academic, pulling down a few hundred million a year, getting by.
Tad: I wish. And fwiw, the difference was in the low five digits.
And I just found out a few months ago that my little brother, who is nine and a half years younger than I am and has only been out of grad school for (I think) five years, is making, literally, ten times as much money as I am. (Exact multiplier depends on his bonuses, ha ha ha.) He is, bless his heart, very embarrassed by this, as he was when he first got out of school and, in his first year, made more money than any other member of my family, including parents, has ever made.
hilzoy: I am reminded of when I spent five months or so working as a waitress in a biker bar…
Story time!
nous_athanatos,
It is much easier to go to school and get jobs when one has a network of successful people around oneself who can help. No one makes it on their own. The inner city teens I knew from a few years back had fewer people to look to for that network and a lot more family and friends who required their help. It is so much more complicated than Hymowitz or Moynihan think it is, and their numbers don’t show anything but the correlation between economic stress and social stress. There is no clear causation anywhere in that article, just a number of assumptions tied to a statistic.
That was beautifully written, man.
Right-Wingers think sex is the ONLY socialization that happens in society…there seems to be a high rate of degeneracy and wanton sex among the wealthy…according to their logic Paris Hilton’s children will be growing up in a trailer park.
Slarti, I’m all in favor of people accepting responsiblity for themselves and their lives.
But there do seem to be people – like the girls on my bus, and the men at hilzoy’s biker bar – who aren’t so much unwilling to accept that responsibility as incapable of even grasping the concept. Even if we take the harshly pragmatic view that “They’ve made their bed, let them lie in it,” that fails to take their kids into consideration, who are sort of left with little choice but to learn the same lifestyle.
What can be done for them? How do we break the cycle?
That, to me, is the real question. We’ve gotten into the habit, in our politics and as a society, of saying “You made your bed,” etc., to each new generation of feckless individuals, as though there was no antecedent cause and effect; no previous generation that we failed to help break the poverty cycle.
When Reagan went on his first social-services cutting spree, I asked those I knew who had voted for him if they thought the people those social services took care of were simply going to disappear. I didn’t get many answers, and the ones I did get were mostly along the lines of “Well, they’ll have to sink or swim, won’t they?” Which, again, ignored the question of what happens to the kids who “sink” when their parents do.
Well, we know “what happens”: the 1980s were a dreadful time to be poor, whether inner city poor or rural poor. Homelessness, truancy, and crime rates shot up. Kids went feral and joined gangs because gangs at least gave their lives structure and meaning.
Current social service policies are even worse than in the Reagan era. They’re meant to be punitive, not rehabilitative. The job market for the undereducated and minimally-skilled is worse than it ever was. Community college and trade schools are hiking tuition and capping enrollment while financial aid disappears.
Once again, we’re dealing with the chronically poor and underachieving as if they’ll obligingly disappear if we ignore them. I don’t think that’ll work any better this time around than it did the last time.
Anarch: not all that much to tell. It was towards the end of grad school, and I decided to take time off, since I thought that I’d probably get more work done on my dissertation if I was doing anything other than teaching. (Teaching: too much like writing to be able to turn to writing as a break; also, since you actually can make a difference in the lives of your students by spending time at it, a ready-made excuse for procrastination that doesn’t require self-deception. Better, I thought, to flip hamburgers, or whatever.) Plus, I wanted to leave Cambridge MA.
So I went to Tucson, but alas it was in the middle of a job slump. I started out throwing papers (NOT recommended), then moved up to the biker bar, just as I was about to completely run out of money. The first night, I took the few dollars I had earned in tips and went to Target and bought shampoo, which I had run out of a few weeks before. (And soap is not nearly as good.) As I said, I worked there for five months, before getting a job at the battered women’s shelter where I had been volunteering.
Working at a biker bar is dull, and there are a lot of obnoxious customers. (Some nice ones too, of course.) The hardest thing was that I had had to fess up to being a Harvard Philosophy grad student — it was the sort of place where holes in your work history are assumed to indicate jail time. And being the only one there who had ever imagined college, let alone grad school, let alone, etc., etc., was, as you might imagine, socially awkward at times. After a bit, though, everyone sort of forgot about it, which I was kind of proud of.
But it was definitely an experience in absolutely completely crossing all known class boundaries, and for a fairly extended period of time.
1. It’s not all Lake Woebegone out there, and not everyone is going to be above average, especially at the their ‘feck’ quotient. This is all the more true, as most people experience a dramatic drop in ‘feck’ in their teenage years. My experience may not be universal, but the re-introduction of ‘feck’ to late-teenagers is one of the hardest challenges of parenting. Lots a chances to throw up one’s hands, and say ‘you’ve made your bed.’
2. If I might put in a plug for the Sentencing Project, it’s a place for good stats, and does great work. Anyone looking for a worthy cause to which a worthwhile charitable donation might be made, could do worse than the SP. (Disclaimer: the executive director is my cousin)
hilzoy–
I can understand wishing to get away, but that was certainly further away than strictly necessary. I should have thought that one advantage of being a graduate student in Harvard’s Philosophy program is that one could feel embarrassed in any company.
CharleyCarp–
yes–I’ve often thought there should be a term “learned fecklessness”, to parallel “learned helplessness”. Having no great surplus of feck myself, I dread the day when my children turn to me to make up their deficiencies. (“Sorry kids, I just can’t give a feck,” does not sound like good parenting).
Hmmm. . .
[contemplating a rhetorical hand grenade]
I can think of one way to help break the cycle, but it’d thoroughly tick off a lot of people left and right: now that Norplant exists–and is an almost perfect method of birth control as long as it’s renewed on schedule–it should be implanted in all young women at the age of puberty (and renewed when it expires), except in cases where tests show that it would pose a significant medical risk due to allergy or similar problems (when a method that works the same way on men is perfected, they should also be required to have it implanted, under the same conditions). Upon reaching the age of 18, a woman could petition to have the implant removed (or not renewed) if she desires to have children and can show an ability to support them. Anyone receiving social services would have to demonstrate that they were in compliance with the contraception law to be eligible–those with religious objections to contraception could opt out, but would not be eligible for public assistance.
[pulls the pin and heads for the exit]
Scott: I see two immediate objections to your plan: 1. It’s awfully hard on the (possibly numerous) children of those who opt out and, more seriously, 2. do you trust the government to decide who should and should not reproduce? I don’t.
I share your concerns to a degree–I would want any law to operate much like a well-written judicial bypass to a parental consent/notification requirement for juvenile abortion would; namely, specific requirements for what the woman would have to demonstrate, with *no* judicial/admnistrative discretion to refuse the request if the requirements are met. As for those who opt out, I would suggest the law be constructed to make failure to provide care for your kids because you’re opting out of the contraception laws be considered grounds for Child Protective Services to intervene if needed. Yes, it would require beefing up their budget and those of related agencies, but it would get the message out–if you’re going to have kids, you need to be able to support them, or not have any more when you’re having tough times. If one’s religion demands eschewing contraception, then one should look to one’s church for help in dealing with the kids that result–or give them up for someone who’s willing to put them first.
Anarch,
Thanks, and apologies for the delay. The program definitely made an impact on those who, like me, wished to avoid pregnancy and STDs above all else. The percentage of kids who feel that way are the majority; however there are far too many who do not.
Absolutely not. In fact, I’d say inner-city kids are far less sheltered than their surburban peers, and therefore are more likely to know just enough to get in trouble.
It probably eliminated a lot of what would be truly accidental pregnancies. I think that most teen pregnancies that occur and are characterized as “accidents” are the result of ambivelence – “we didn’t want to get pregnant, but we didn’t do anything to stop it from happening.” A roll of dice, let’s say – but the fact that they are willing to gamble in the first place seems to be the biggest problem.
I would characterize it as making a difference, but not at developing the sincere desire to avoid pregnancy amongst teenagers, which I figure is the major issue if you’re looking to stop it. And how that’s done I wish I knew!
Remember “The Full Monty”? Some out-of-work English guys revert to adolescent behavior while the women take all the responisbility. The men at one point in the movie discuss how it feels to be irrelevent, useful to women only for sex. The characters were men who used to be gainfully employed; fecklessness was new to them.
Irish folk music is full of references to feckless, often drunken males, and admiration for the successful criminal is one of the main themes. Up until a few years ago Irish women were the responisble parties within a marriage and Irish men were not. (Of course this is a genralization, a stereotype, even, but, in Northern Ireland, unemployment and fecklesness have been part of the culture for a long time.)
Rap music has the same themes as Irish folk music: the glorification of the criminal male, the reckless, abandoned lifestyle.
In Harper’s awhile back there was an article about one of the Bush administration’s marriage promotion projects in, I believe, Kansas City. The idea was to teach urban poor black women to value marriage and to have the social skills to stay married. Aside from the arrogant paternalism, the project was failing because the women already valued marriage; they just had enough sense not to marry any of the feckless, shiftless men available to them.
The common theme throughout all these examples and cultural references is lack of living wage jobs for men who aren’t academically inclined. Without a job that pays enough to support a family, or at least contribute significantly to supporting a family, the man is useful only for sex. There is no advantage to growing up and being responisble.
Lily–
cf. Roddy Doyle’s character in the Commitments who says “the Irish are the blacks of Europe”. (I’m guilty on all counts of fecklessness and irresponsibility, but I have certainly never been accused of being useful for sex).
So part of what the Kansas City story shows, I think, is that there is not a problem with young women. There is a problem with young men. And part of the problem is that our culture glamorizes an endless-summer extended male adolescence. Not so much TV–it seems more common to find more or less happy married guys on the tube. But in Hollywood, the ideal is still the swinging bachelor.
Reading the exchanges between posters above, a familiar pattern emerges, that liberals find the statistical, population-based correlations to be the leading, blindingly obvious facts about behavior. Surely it is no *accident* that the vast majority of these people, raised in these same conditions, wind up with these same attitudes?
Conservatives take personal choice to be supreme–social conditions can’t force anyone to do anything, we’re all free, people make choices, etc.
(Presumably liberals all share their outlook because they were forced into it by their social conditions, whereas conservatives all arrived at their outlook through a completely free choice).
There just doesn’t seem to be a viable common language yet for talking about the interplay between societal factors and personal choices; both sides too often look as though they are denying any role for the opposition’s favored causal villain. Liberals wind up looking as though they take human beings to be automata, dupes, or mindless victims; conservatives look as though they are turning a blind eye to the shaping power of culture.
Good thing we’re creating the new language here on this site. (Oh yeah, here where we don’t call people “liberals” and “conservatives”–oops).
According to this Planned Parenthood site, Norplant is “no longer available.”
Is there another source for this? I can’t find a definitive statement of a Norplant ban other than your link–some details would be appreciated if anyone has them.
“Go Ask Alice,” a Columbia University award-winning health-information service, flatly states in a Jan. 2005 update that the Norplant service is no longer available. It’s a good service, and I trust it. If anyone tracks down the reason that Norplant was discontinued, I’d be interested to hear about it.
When I said “good service, and I trust it,” I meant Alice, not Norplant. I’m familiar with Alice, and don’t know Norplant from Adam.
Jonas your first comment elicited an audible “ack!” response from me. I understand that it could partly be interpreted as a swipe at the linked author, but no political policy implications? Even if only to suggest types of policies we should avoid there are implications. How well did we address these welfare “consumer” concerns? In the families section there you might note reference to some anti-family policies. Let’s drag one out and look at what its implementation was like. The “man of the house” rule was part of welfare policy in most states through the seventies, and through the eighties in many places. We actually had social services workers sitting in cars outside welfare recipients’ residences waiting to see if a man who entered the house at some point in the evening left by four or five a.m. If not, the household had a “man of the house” and its occupants could be denied welfare. Do we really think policies like this had/have no impact beyond trimming taxpayer spending? Rhetorical question, of course. Likewise Medicaid availability for sick children.
Comparing incomes leaves much to be desired when considering the ability to finance activities such as higher education, especially in the past. Wealth that can be employed as capitalist investment is rather more important. College financial aid workers know this. The simplest way to tie this into studies at least partially would be adding homeowners’ equity to the comparison of outcomes. This is an important part of the supports (or lack thereof) that nous aptly describes. And if they know in advance that it is lacking, what do parents tell their children wrt college planning? If it is still “reach for the stars” it won’t and perhaps shouldn’t be so without heavy caveats. You can add other disparities to the consideration of that last sentence.
Mostly off topic- for economists, historians, and perhaps philosophy students, interested in things their fields buried I humbly offer summer reading from way back in ’71.
Jack, try here.
CMatt,
Ack, indeed! I fear I have lost the ability to articulate what I’m thinking these days! I did not mean to state that there are no political policy implications – but rather that I am exasperated by the notion that political policy is the tool that we should expect to use to solve these problems. Policies can be complimentary to the goals or detrimental – but they won’t be the solution nor should they bear the most prominent blame.
Tad Brennan,
Not to hammer this point too much, but there is no viable language because these issues wind up being a political debate, not a constructive conversation about what need to be done. We’re all looking at the government, because it’s the biggest discrete tool we can bring to bear on the problem but meanwhile using our own roles in society, were enough people to care, would likely be more effective.
Well, there’s the problem that the young women will have children with the problematic young men. What I wouldn’t give if they just waited until their mid to late twenties to have the out-of-wedlock child of their sketchy boyfriends!
TadB: “There just doesn’t seem to be a viable common language yet for talking about the interplay between societal factors and personal choices; both sides too often look as though they are denying any role for the opposition’s favored causal villain. Liberals wind up looking as though they take human beings to be automata, dupes, or mindless victims; conservatives look as though they are turning a blind eye to the shaping power of culture.”
— I think that the basic idea that we are all responsible for our choices, but that various things beyond our control can make it easier or more difficult for us to accomplish certain things via those choices, is presumably clear. It gets all screwed up for several reasons, I think:
First, and most obviously, both liberals and conservatives have stories they tell themselves about their opponents, and when either says something that seems to fit into the other’s caricatures, bad things can happen. A liberal says “there are social pressures that make it harder to do certain things”, and a conservative hears: “we are helpless victims!” Or a conservative says: “you know, criminals are responsible for making lousy choices”, and a liberal hears: “social forces don’t exist! we are all isolated little monads in a vacuum, and if a kid who has grown up in an unspeakably bleak world where just having a job is an extraordinary achievement commits a crime, he’s exactly as much to blame as a kid from Scarsdale whose parents gave him every imaginable advantage, including love, guidance, education, the whole nine yards”.
Personally, I just take it for granted that we are all morally responsible for what we do (unless we are e.g. insane), but that the degree to which we deserve blame or credit depends in part on how hard what we did was, and social forces can of course affect that. So I feel happy agreeing with the positive claims put forward by both sides, and disagreeing with the supposed implications about the other side being wrong.
A second problem, I think, comes from the tendency to conflate the question (a) whether you are responsible for X in the sense that it would be appropriate to praise or blame you for it) with the question (b) whether you are responsible for X is the sense that taking care of it is your responsibility’ and then (sometimes) to take any claim that anyone should do anything about X to mean that that person, not you, is “responsible” for X.
Example: a liberal notes that crime prevention programs often reduce crime. A conservative says: but you’re saying the government is responsible for crime, not the criminal! When in fact, if the liberal is me, she can think: (a) the criminal is responsible (= should be blamed) for committing crimes, and (b) each of us is responsible (=it is our responsibility) not to commit any crimes in the future, but also (c) if there’s some program that would reduce the incidence of crime without e.g. violating anyone’s rights, and if it’s not too expensive, then of course we should do it. I mean, getting mugged or raped or burglarized sucks, and some appreciable number of muggings, rapes, or robberies can be prevented by, say, having a midnight basketball program, why on earth not? (I might even go on to say that while we are all responsible for not committing crimes, government officials are responsible for figuring out ways of protecting citizens, within the limits of the law and budgets and so on; and pointing to criminals’ responsibility not to commit crime can be a way of deflecting attention from their own responsibilities.)
Does anyone think it would be worth my writing a longer post on this?
in the last longish para., that should be: and IF some appreciable number…
“Liberals wind up looking as though they take human beings to be automata, dupes, or mindless victims; conservatives look as though they are turning a blind eye to the shaping power of culture.”
Good point, though I think if we look at the problem from a results-oriented perspective rather than an ideologically-driven one, there’s common ground to be found.
I’m a liberal who agrees with Scott: I’d like to see birth control be mandatory for all girls, with no exceptions for the well-to-do or well-connected. We recognize mandatory childhood vaccinations against diseases as a social good (preventing contagion) at least as much as we do as a personal one (preventing infection).
I don’t see teen pregnancy as any different, really. I don’t see having babies as a God-given right that overrides everything else – esp. not when it’s society, not God, that has to provide for mother and child. And so much that makes chronic poverty chronic is the educational, health, and economic consequences of teenage pregnancy.
I’m in favor of fully-funded social programs. I’m also in favor of weaning people off them. That’s a lot easier to do, and the money goes a lot further, if the focus can be on education and employment training rather than on supporting endless cycles of kids-having-kids.
The difference, Hilzoy, is that generally we’re right. We overclaim all of the time, which is unfortunate, but we’re looking for honest-to-God answers. Saying things like, “They just need to take responsibility for their lives,” (which I note they’re now saying about the Iraqis is an attempt to deny any moral responsibility for the mess they’ll be running out on in 6 months) is not an honest attempt at an answer. Not in my world, anyway.
You know, if we’re going to go down the George Orwell path of mandatory – if temporary – sterilization for the youth of America, it would be more sensible and effective to find a way to sterilize the young men. Women can only be pregnant once every nine-month period; men can impregnate as many women as is practical during that same period. Let’s just cut it off at the source!
Of course, we’re not going to be doing this anyway, so it’s largely academic. I’ll appeal to hilzoy, if necessary, to explain how it would be an unbelievably grotesque violation of individual autonomy.
Does anyone think it would be worth my writing a longer post on this?
Yes.
” [I]t would be more sensible and effective to find a way to sterilize the young men.”
If you know of a non-surgical, reversible means of sterilizing young men, tell us what it is.
“[I]t would be an unbelievably grotesque violation of individual autonomy.”
How? It doesn’t stop people from having sex; it just prevents accidental, unplanned, unwanted pregnancy. How is that different from mandatory vaccinations to prevent disease?
I’m not being snarky, Phil. I am very aware that the proposal is a violation of personal autonomy. I don’t like the idea. I’m a stalwart pro-choicer; that doesn’t mean I “like” abortion. I think mandatory, reversible sterilization might be a necessary means to breaking a really bad, really destructive cycle – just as legal abortion is necessary for preventing unwanted, unplanned babies.
Tell me what your solution would be.
CaseyL–
I’m actually not so appalled by what you are suggesting. I.e., I wouldn’t *like* it any more than you would, and I probably don’t want to see it happen, but I certainly think it’s within the realm of the discussable, and ought to be debated more widely.
I also don’t have any tips on the reversible sterilization of young men, either, but here’s a proposal that might go some way towards having the same results.
Mandatory DNA profiling of all young males, on reaching puberty.
It seems to me absurd that in this day and age, children can be born “fatherless”, i.e. without a legal determination of paternity. Every kid has a father. Every father should be legally responsible for all of the costs of the rearing of their children, up till the age of 18. (That’s the child’s age, not the father’s).
Most importantly, every teen-age boy should know this: if you get a girl pregnant, it’s your own life you are ruining. You will be responsible, publicly, legally, financially, and in every other way.
When teen-age boys are as paranoid about unwanted pregnancies as (most) teen-age girls are, there will be less need for sterilizing either.
And compulsory collection of DNA samples strikes me as somewhat *less* of a threat to individual autonomy than compulsory sterilization. (Though of course none of us, liberal or conservative, can view these kinds of expansions of state power with anything but dismay).
And compulsory collection of DNA samples strikes me as somewhat *less* of a threat to individual autonomy than compulsory sterilization.
Yes, I’m sure no such database would ever find its way into the hands of, you know, the cops. Or the CIA. Or medical insurers. No, no, no – perish the thought!
When we’re getting to talking about mandatory DNA databases and compulsory sterilization, I’m packing and hauling my ass to Australia, or someplace. Absolutely monstrous.
“[I]t would be an unbelievably grotesque violation of individual autonomy.”
How? It doesn’t stop people from having sex; it just prevents accidental, unplanned, unwanted pregnancy
If you cannot understand how subjecting minor children to mandatory contraceptive implants without concern for their — or their parents’ — personal will is a grotesque violation of individual autonomy, I quite literally cannot explain it to you.
. How is that different from mandatory vaccinations to prevent disease?
Because if you don’t vaccinate your kid for measles, everyone else’s kid can catch it from you. Nobody else is going to catch pregnant if your kid gets knocked up. (Blah blah blah welfare public costs social order blah blah blah. I know. There’s a nontrivial difference.)
Tell me what your solution would be.
Oh, dear, I don’t claim to have one. I’m sorry, I’m going to have to be the Individual Party of “No” on this one. Temporary, Compulsory Mandatory Sterilization is a bad enough idea that I don’t feel compelled to have a competing one.
Tad, I’m not sure I go for the DNA register, since I don’t see how it would be effective.
One: It aims at the decision making mechanism, rather than the biological process. People who make flawed decisions about whether to use birth control – when the results are relatively immediate; i.e., pregnancy – will also make flawed decisions when the results are relatively remote; i.e., paternity tests, court hearings, and financial judgments.
Two: The fathers are generally as financially strapped as the mothers. Even if you identify them, even if you get a judgment against them, that doesn’t address the central issue of preventing people from a lifetime of dependency on subsidies, of never living up to their capabilities, and of not raising their children to follow in their footsteps.
CaseyL–
All true. Plus we get deadbeat fathers who say that they have no incentive to work harder because it just means their ex-girl friend would get more, other guys who will force women to have abortions, etc. etc. Lots of ugly consequences.
But here’s what’s weird: these consequences are currently avoided by pretending that something is unknowable, when in fact it is quite easily knowable. Each kid had some biological father. That father is more or less responsible for the existence, and hence upkeep and rearing, of the resultant child.
We load all of this responsibility onto the mother, and give the father a free pass. That seems to me absurd.
(Or, to put it differently: it seems to me unsurprising given that the public guardians of our moral attitudes are usually sex-obsessed misogynists who find female sexuality abhorrent but want to ensure that young men can behave badly without consequences).
Also–it’s important to remember that this is not a Global War on Unwanted Pregnancy, but a Global Struggle Against Unwanted Pregnancy. What I mean is: a lot of the action here is about ideas, attitudes, and ideology.
I am less interested in actually garnishing the wages of any particular McDonald’s worker, than in getting teen-age boys to see a stark connection between sex and eighteen-plus years of enforced slavery. No woman can approach a sexual encounter without the risk of pregnancy floating somewhere in the back of her mind, and this has an effect on behavior. I’d like to see the same effect on male behavior. CaseyL’s plan might eliminate the basis for the worry; short of that, I’d just like to spread the worry more evenly between the sexes.
Phil–yup, it all looks pretty dystopic. Insurers will get our DNA, the cops will, the CIA, and so on. Course, that’s probably going to happen within a few decades anyhow. Indeed, if I am accused of the art heist at the local museum and they say they found my saliva on a canvas, I’m not sure how much I can do to resist DNA testing even as the law stands. Ditto for paternity suits.
So in a way my proposal is very modest–just making routine what could already be done in any individual case. That’s part of why it seems strange to me that any child goes through life nowadays *without* having a legal determination of their biological father’s identity: each mother can already institute one or more paternity suits, request DNA evidence (I think, though the lawyers can weigh in with details), and establish the biological facts.
I *hope* that if this became simply a routine procedure, i.e. if everyone just *knew* that paternity will out, then this would have a sobering effect on young males, who (again) seem to me the real source of the problem.
Of course, we’re not going to be doing this anyway, so it’s largely academic. I’ll appeal to hilzoy, if necessary, to explain how it would be an unbelievably grotesque violation of individual autonomy.
Yes, because it’s a vital personal right to be able to have children that one is not mature or financially secure enough to take care of.
Of course, the irony of this is that the right-to-lifers more or less agree with you on this–which suggests that most roads in the current climate lead to a continued flow of hundreds of thousands of illegitimate children being born into poverty every year, with no prospect of getting out or of doing anything else than continuing the cycle in about, oh, fifteen years. Positive feedback mechanism much?
Yes, because it’s a vital personal right to be able to have children that one is not mature or financially secure enough to take care of.
When you identify someone who has made this argument, Eiland, feel free to take it up with him or her. Or learn to read. I’ll let you decide which is a) easier, or b) more likely to get results.
Of course, the irony of this is that the right-to-lifers more or less agree with you on this . . .
Since I didn’t make that argument (assuming that the argument “it’s a vital personal right to be able to have children that one is not mature or financially secure enough to take care of” is the antecedent of “this”), you’re embarassingly wrong. Not an uncommon position for you, but still, in front of all these people and everything . . .
Ten yards for mindreading and replay of down. Try again, Eiland.
Hard to tell what argument you were making, Phil, since you immediately played the “if you don’t understand I can’t help you” card. If you want to be understood, knock off the hissy fits and spell out your objections explictly.
M. Scott: If you want to be understood, knock off the hissy fits and spell out your objections explictly.
Phil just did, M. Scott – didn’t you read his post at 04:39 PM?
Yes, I’m fully aware of his views on alleged “mindreading”–but he’s given me precisely nothing on *why* he’s violently opposed to mandatory contraception for minors incapable of supporting themselves, and he’s used some rather dishonest language in the process of providing the zero information. As a result, I’ve had to come to my own conclusions. If he can provide more useful information, I’d be glad to hear it.
Here’s what I said, explicitly and in informal standard English, was my objection, Eiland:
. . . subjecting minor children to mandatory contraceptive implants without concern for their — or their parents’ — personal will . . .
I thought it was pretty clear: I am opposed to subjecting minor children to contraceptive surgical procedures against their or their parents’ will because individuals have the right to decide for themselves what surgeries they will be subject to and what substances or devices will be implanted into their bodies.
Now, you tell us which of those words you don’t understand, and one of the adults will explain them to you.
. . . he’s used some rather dishonest language . . .
Are you calling me a liar?
As a result, I’ve had to come to my own conclusions.
There are some among us — we call them “logicians” — who refer to that as “constructing a strawman.” It’s usually a good indicator that you’re on the losing end, but far be it from me to imply such.
I suppose you could have, you know, asked me rather than stating outright that I believed something I didn’t, then stating that pro-lifers agreed with the thing I don’t believe that you said I did, then stated that me and the pro-lifers were leading America down the garden path to cyclical ruin, but where’s the fun in that? Your way was much more entertaining!
And the “why” behing all that is a fairly obvious first principle: It is generally wrong to perform surgery on people without their consent. If we’re not operating from the same principle, then you’re going to have to let me know what your are.
Sorry, but I forgot: Just to make you feel more comfortable and at-home, “**snicker**” and [something irrelevant about some third party whose politics I oppose.] That should get you in the groove.
” am opposed to subjecting minor children to contraceptive surgical procedures against their or their parents’ will because individuals have the right to decide for themselves what surgeries they will be subject to and what substances or devices will be implanted into their bodies.”
Are you then also opposed to advocacy groups providing medical care to children whose parents refuse to do so on religious grounds?
it seems strange to me that any child goes through life nowadays *without* having a legal determination of their biological father’s identity: each mother can already institute one or more paternity suits, request DNA evidence (I think, though the lawyers can weigh in with details), and establish the biological facts.
I believe that in many or all states it is necessary for a woman seeking welfare payments for a child to identify the father. In the event the man named denies paternity the court can, and routinely does, order a DNA test. I used to be peripherally involved in this business and as I recall virtually all the identifications proved correct. (There’s a surprise).
DNA paternity testing does not reveal other information about the subjects. You could not, for, example, determine susceptibility to hereditary disease from the paternity test.