Tag Archives: Teen Pregnancy

News

New study finds that cohabitation is harmful to children

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Note: I had to pull the Mike Adams column because it was mistakenly published today when it was supposed to be posted on Monday. So I re-scheduled my post to Monday.

From communist NPR, of all places. (H/T Mark Driscoll via Mary)

Excerpt:

In a new report out on Tuesday, they say research shows the children of cohabiting parents are at risk for a broad range of problems, from trouble in school to psychological stress, physical abuse and poverty.

The study is put out by the National Marriage Project and the Institute for American Values, groups whose missions include strengthening marriage and family life. It suggests a shift in focus is needed away from the children of divorce, which has long been a preoccupying concern for such scholars.

Brad Wilcox, a report co-author and head of the National Marriage Project, says divorce rates have steadily dropped since their peak in 1979-80, while rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing have soared. Forty-one percent of all births are now to unwed mothers, many of them living with — but not married to — the child’s father.

[…]Wilcox says the children of the divorce revolution grew up to be understandably gun-shy about marriage. Many are putting it off, even after they have kids. But research shows such couples are twice as likely to split.

“Ironically,” he says, “they’re likely to experience even more instability than they would [have] if they had taken the time and effort to move forward slowly and get married before starting a family.”

In fact, another recent study finds that a quarter of American women with multiple children conceived them with more than one man. Psychologist John Gottman, a co-author of Tuesday’s report, says that kind of instability can have a negative impact on kids in all kinds of ways.

“Both in externalizing disorders, more aggression,” Gottman says, “and internalizing disorders, more depression. Children of cohabiting couples are at greater risk than children of married couples.”

I think the story of this post is that pastor Mark Driscoll posted this. If there is one hope for saving society, it is that Christian pastors like Mark Driscoll and Wayne Grudem get widely imitated in their habit of showing WHY what the Bible says is true, and linking WHAT the Bible says is true with real, published evidence – scientific, historical, statistical, etc. Either we start to think about emphasizing Christianity as a true worldview, or Christianity is done, and Western Civilization with it. A lot of men would immediately return to church if church involved more apologetics and worldview content.

Here’s my previous mean, snarky post opposing cohabitation.

Marriage is the best way to prevent child poverty, so let’s have some policies that promote marriage and discourage cohabitation.

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News

Obama administration wants birth control to be covered by health insurance

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Here’s the raw story from U.S. News and World Report.

Excerpt:

Beginning Aug. 1, 2012, women in the United States will have their birth control covered by insurance companies, free of co-pays, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced Monday.

“Most private health care plans, including the private health care plan available to members of Congress, already include most of these services, including contraception. Family planning is something that keeps women healthy, and it was an important piece of today’s announcement,” Stephanie Cutter, a White House advisor, told ABC News Monday.

The move to make contraception free to women is one of eight new measures aimed at providing “preventive health services” to women, the HHS said. They follow on recommendations from a report issued July 19 by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), which advises the federal government.

The new initiatives are based on those recommendations and seek to expand women’s access to preventive services under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

“The Affordable Care Act helps stop health problems before they start,” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in an agency statement released Monday. “These historic guidelines are based on science and existing literature, and will help ensure women get the preventive health benefits they need.”

The IOM report was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to identify “gaps in preventive services for women as well as measures that will further ensure women’s health and well-being,” the agency said.

The problem with this is that taxpayer-funded contraception has been tried in the UK and it has been found to raise unwanted pregnancy rates. So why would anyone do this? Well, because more premarital sex means fewer stable marriages. And marital breakdown results in fatherlessness, which gives the state a crisis to solve. And whenever the state has a crisis to solve, they can push for higher taxes and more social engineering. For example, they can equalize life outcomes between single mothers and married couples by subsidizing the one former with the wealth generated by the latter.  Besides, children accept what public schools teach them much better when there is no pesky father around to compete with the government-run schools.

But there’s a more sinister reason. More unwanted pregnancies means more abortions, which are mainly provided by Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood will get more fees and the Democrat Party will get more donations.

I think that Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse is going to be discussing this tonight on Catholic Radio of San Diego from 6 to 7 PM Pacific Standard Time.

Commentary

MUST-READ: Melanie Phillips blames single mothers for family breakdown

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Melanie Phillips
Melanie Phillips

Melanie Phillips takes UK Conservative Party leader David Cameron to task in the UK Daily Mail. Sent to me by Dina! I love this article!

Excerpt:

Singling out ‘runaway dads’ for censure, [David Cameron] said that such individuals should be treated like drunk drivers — people who are beyond the pale and upon whom should be heaped ‘the full force of shame’.

Now, excoriating ‘runaway’ or ‘deadbeat’ dads is a familiar refrain. We all know the scenario: feckless youths getting one girl pregnant after another and abandoning each one in turn, playing next to no part in the upbringing of the children they have serially fathered.

This is, indeed, reckless and reprehensible behaviour. But it is only part of a much more complex and deeply rooted problem.

Most pertinently, it totally ignores the fact that there is another feckless actor in this dysfunctional family drama — the mother, who may be having children by a series of different men.

In line with politically correct thinking, Mr Cameron presents such girls or women as the hapless victims of predatory males. But that is just plain wrong. For at the most fundamental level, this whole process is driven by women and girls.

In those far-off days before the sexual revolution, relations between the sexes were based on a kind of unspoken bargain.

Women needed the father of their children to stick around while they grew up, in return for which a woman gave a solemn undertaking to be faithful to this one man.

For his part, the father’s interests were served by being offered not just a permanent sexual relationship but a guarantee from the trust placed in his wife that the children were, indeed, his.

With the combination of the sexual revolution, the Pill and the welfare state, however, women’s interests changed. Suddenly they were being told sex outside marriage was fine, unmarried motherhood was fine — and crucially, that the welfare state would provide them with the means to live without male support.

Among upper-middle-class trendies, marriage became an irksome anachronism and ‘living together’ became fashionable.

At the bottom of the social scale, however, these permissive signals from above combined disastrously with widespread unemployment among young men, whose lack of income made them an unattractive marriage prospect.

As a result, girls decided that, while they wanted a baby, the available fathers were usually a waste of space and so they didn’t want them to remain a part of their lives.

These young men then treated the message that they weren’t wanted as a licence for irresponsibility. And so the ‘runaway dad’ was born.

To single out these boys for censure — while calling lone mothers ‘heroic’, as Mr Cameron did — is not only unfair and perverse, but will fail to get to grips with the problem.

If it is to be remedied, women and girls have to come to a different conclusion about where their interests lie.

That means the welfare state has to stop playing the role of surrogate husband through the benefits it gives single mothers.

READ THE WHOLE THING. As with Canada’s Barbara Kay, I am not in full agreement with Melanie on every topic. But she is awesome on this topic!

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