Tag Archives: Family

News

Feminist wants UK government to provide free IVF

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From the UK Telegraph, an editorial by Theodore Dalrymple. (H/T RuthBlog)

Excerpt:

[The chairman of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, Suzi Leather] …has suggested that, henceforth, the clause requiring doctors to take account of the need of a child for a father, when offering in vitro fertilisation to infertile women, should be removed from the law. The idea that fathers are necessary or even desirable in the lives of children is, in the opinion of Ms Leather, too old-fashioned to be entertained any longer.

[…]In Ms Leather’s brave new world, women are to have children merely because they want them, as is their government-given right, irrespective of their ability to bring them up, or who has to pay for them, or the consequences to the children themselves. Men are to be permanently infantilised, their income being in essence pocket money for them to spend on their enjoyments, having no serious responsibilities at all (beyond paying tax). Henceforth, the state will be father to the child, and the father will be child of the state.

This paper from the Heritage Foundation cites a very interesting study.

A seminal British study confirms that a child is safest when his biological parents are married and least safe when his mother is cohabiting with a man other than her husband. Specifically, the family Court Reporter Survey for England and Wales presents concrete evidence that children are 20 to 33 times safer living with their biological married parents than in other family configurations.

I think that if you take taxpayer money from working fathers and pay for unmarried women to have fatherless children, you will get fewer fathers and more fatherless children.

Commentary

Are lesbian couples better for kids than heterosexual couples?

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Apparently, lesbian couples can be as good at parenting children as traditional married couples. That was the conclusion of a new study anyway. Who authored it, and who funded it?

Excerpt:

Several media outlets including CNN, Time magazine, Reuters and US News and World Report, have promoted the US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, which claims children raised by lesbian parents are “psychologically well-adjusted” and have “fewer behavioral problems” than children raised by heterosexual parents.

Of those four outlets, however, only Reuters reported that the author of the study, Dr. Nanette Gartrell, is herself a lesbian. According to the New York Times Gartrell wed her partner, Dee Mosbacher, in 2005.

Seven out of nine groups that provided funding for the study are gay advocacy groups, including the Gill Foundation and the Gay Lesbian Medical Association. Reuters, Time and U.S. News and World Report did not include the sources of funding for the study.

[…]The problem with many studies regarding children of gay parents, according to the late Steven Nock in a 2004 National Public Radio interview, is that they rely on “self-recruited” subjects. The question, Nock said, is “whether or not people who volunteer to participate in studies resemble the sort who do not.”

Gartrell’s study reportedly recruited its 78 subject couples “through announcements in bookstores, lesbian events and newspapers” in Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, according to CNN.

So already we should be on guard.

But there’s more! Here’s the methodological problem with the study: (H/T ECM)

In a letter published online in Pediatrics, Professor Walter Schumm, who has served as an expert witness for the State of Florida in a trial concerning gay adoption, points out, “at least 67 per cent of the mothers in the [lesbian family study] had at least a college education compared to approximately 28 per cent of women of similar age in US Census data” so that the effects seen could be partly due to higher levels of education rather than “gender” per se.

Another letter points out that ethnicity and region of residence also differ considerably between the two groups, with the control group having “many times more minorities and many more children from the South” of the US. For example, around 68 per cent of the controls were “white/Caucasian” compared with 93 per cent of the study group. That writer expresses surprise that there was no attempt to adjust the results for these differences, and that the study was accepted all the same by Pediatrics — the journal of the country’s leading professional group.

So this study is as reliable as East Anglia studies on man-made global warming. But a lot of people in the media will cite it anyway, because it sends the right message. It sends the message that people who oppose same-sex marriage are ignorant bigots and that fathers are totally unnecessary for the development of children.

And that’s what the elites in media, education and government want people to believe. They want that view to be made into law and reflected in public policy. And they don’t really care if children are raised without fathers, just like they don’t care if unborn children are killed in the womb. Because adult happiness is more important than children’s well-being.

Here is my previous post explaining how same-sex couples differ from traditional couples.

Commentary

Are biological fathers or unrelated men more dangerous for children?

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This article from the Weekly Standard answers the question.

Excerpt:

A March 1996 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics contains some interesting findings that indicate just how widespread the problem may be. In a nationally representative survey of state prisoners jailed for assaults against or murders of children, fully one-half of respondents reported the victim was a friend, acquaintance, or relative other than offspring. (All but 3 percent of those who committed violent crimes against children were men.) A close relationship between victim and victimizer is also suggested by the fact that three-quarters of all the crimes occurred in either the perpetrator’s home or the victim’s.

A 1994 paper published in the Journal of Comparative Family Studies looked at 32,000 documented cases of child abuse. Of the victims, only 28 percent lived with both biological parents (far fewer than the 68 percent of all children who live with both parents); 44 percent lived with their mother only (as do 25 percent of all children); and 18 percent lived with their mother and an unrelated adult (double the 9 percent of all children who live with their mother and an unrelated adult).

These findings mirror a 1993 British study by the Family Education Trust, which meticulously explored the relationship between family structure and child abuse. Using data on documented cases of abuse in Britain between 1982 and 1988, the report found a high correlation between child abuse and the marital status of the parents.

Specifically, the British study found that the incidence of abuse was an astounding 33 times higher in homes where the mother was cohabiting with an unrelated boyfriend than in stable nuclear families. Even when the boyfriend was the children’s biological father, the chances of abuse were twice as high.

These findings are consonant with those published a year earlier by Leslie Margolin of the University of Iowa in the journal Child Abuse and Neglect. Prof. Margolin found that boyfriends were 27 times more likely than natural parents to abuse a child. The next-riskiest group, siblings, were only twice as likely as parents to abuse a child.

More recently, a report by Dr. Michael Stiffman presented at the latest meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics, in October, studied the 175 Missouri children under the age of 5 who were murdered between 1992 and 1994. It found that the risk of a child’s dying at the hands of an adult living in the child’s own household was eight times higher if the adult was biologically unrelated.

The Heritage Foundation’s Patrick Fagan discovered that the number of child-abuse cases appeared to rise in the 1980s along with the general societal acceptance of cohabitation before, or instead of, marriage. That runs counter to the radical-feminist view, which holds that marriage is an oppressive male institution of which violence is an integral feature. If that were true, then child abuse and domestic violence should have decreased along with the rise in cohabitation.

Heritage also found that in the case of very poor children (those in households earning less than $ 15,000 per year), 75 percent lived in a household where the biological father was absent. And 50 percent of adults with less than a high-school education lived in cohabitation arrangements. “This mix — poverty, lack of education, children, and cohabitation — is an incubator for violence,” Fagan says.

Why, then, do we ignore the problem? Fagan has a theory: “It is extremely politically incorrect to suggest that living together might not be the best living arrangement.”

The moral of the story is that it is a lot safer for children if we promote marriage as a way of attaching mothers and fathers to their children. Fathers who have a biological connection to children are a lot less likely to harm them. And a lot of social problems like child poverty, promiscuity and violence cannot be solved by replacing a father with a check from the government. We need to support fathers by empowering them in their traditional roles. Let the men lead.