Did Roe v. Wade Cause Illegitimacy?
John R. Lott’s Wall Street Journal article, titled “It’s Not Enough to Be ‘Wanted’,[1] imperfectly points out the essential dynamics underlying how Roe v. Wade led to rampant illegitimacy. But, this is only a rest stop half-way to Peoria.
Briefly, Lott explains how Roe may have led to lax attitudes towards premarital sex by women, who upon getting pregnant out of wedlock, had choices to keep or abort the baby.
In Lott’s theory, women who once married or put the baby up for adoption now had other options: abortion or single motherhood. Lott’s analysis is fatally flawed because he does not incorporate the controlling role of contraceptives in sexual behavior or explain its impact on marriage, abortion, and illegitimacy. Lott weighs the importance of contraceptives with extraordinarily passive abandon:
“With abortion seen as a backup, women as well as men became less careful in using contraceptives as well as more likely to have premarital sex”.
This is a backwards analysis: Contraceptives are what brought on the “free sex” revolution. Contraceptives disconnected sex from reproduction (and abortion), and made abortion largely unnecessary. The availability of abortion as a “backup” has little impact on women being “less careful” about using contraceptives.
Lott assumes that women “accidentally” get pregnant out of wedlock, and then for moral reasons want to keep the baby or then want an abortion. Lott thinks the polarizing nexus is between abortion and “pro-life” illegitimacy. He is tragically wrong on both counts.
Few women “accidentally” get pregnant out of wedlock. Birth control is more effective than at any time in human civilization. The birth control pill has been widely available since introduction in 1960 – during which time illegitimacy exploded.
The most-effective forms of birth control are invisible to the male, who has no way to know that birth control is actually being used. Women who do not want to get pregnant use birth control. They do not get pregnant. Abortion is rarely an issue in this picture because responsible women use contraceptives to avoid the traps of illegitimacy, single-motherhood, abortion, or marriage to a man they do not really wish to marry.
The Powerful Effect of Welfare and Child-Support Entitlements
Women who want to become single mothers merely say they are using birth control, get pregnant out of wedlock, marry the welfare (now the child-support state), dragging suckered men into peonage as servants and political scapegoats of it all. Abortion is not a major element for these women: they want to get pregnant out of wedlock.
Those who oppose abortion on moral grounds often make the mistake of believing they must endorse the child-support state so women will not “choose” abortion. This caused the “moral majority” to tragically drive the problem of illegitimacy it claims to oppose. Automated child support and welfare entitlements have been hyper-stimulating millions of women to intentionally get pregnant out of wedlock for many years. In parallel, imagine for a moment what would happen if abortion were an entitled activity!
Lott’s analysis on men’s response is particularly slothful. He does not consider why record numbers of women get pregnant out of wedlock in the first place:
“Many men, feeling tricked into unwanted fatherhood, will likely wash their hands of the affair altogether, thinking, “I never wanted a baby. It’s her choice, so let her raise the baby herself.”
Illegitimacy Prior to 1973
If Lott’s analysis is correct, a palpable increase in illegitimacy rates would correlate with the Roe. V. Wade decision. There is no substantive correlation to be found.
Illegitimacy was already rampant in the black community in the 1960’s. Black illegitimacy rates had climbed from 16.8% in 1940 to 23.6% in 1960, with one in four black families headed by a single mother. White illegitimacy went from 2% to 3.07%. The rise of illegitimacy was then attributed to high unemployment rates among black males.[2]
Even back then, Senator Patrick Moynihan attributed the continuing black illegitimacy rate to an already-established pathology of intergenerational illegitimacy and under-parented children. But the Johnson Great Society, glibly marketed as the way “to help the American Negro move beyond opportunity to achievement”, instead entitled the pathology leaving even more single-mothers addicted to welfare benefits derived by having more children out of wedlock.
Between 1960 and 1970, the overall illegitimacy rate doubled from 5.3% to 10.7% of all births.[3]
Illegitimacy After 1973
Between 1970 and 1994, overall illegitimacy rates rose from 10.7% to 32.6% of all births roguhly a 10% increase per decade.[4] We see that the trend line of illegitimacy before and after Roe reasonably straight, representing a steady continual increase in illegitimacy. Clearly, where about hals children are now raised by single mothers, we can no longer attribute either illegitimacy or divorce to male unemployment. The primary causal factor today is that non-marital childbearing and childrearing is heavily entitled by the largest line item in the Federal budget.
How Roe Magnifies the War On Fatherhood
America is experiencing record illegitimacy rates – today predominantly driven by women over the age of twenty who are not sexual neophytes and who know how to use (or not use) birth control as the trump in the deadly feminist card game of socio-political power.
We see that America’s modern dark age is, in fact, a result of the war on fatherhood. Authors such as David Kupelian,[5] Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson,[6] and Dr. Stephen Baskerville [7] have documented this is breathtaking detail.
The war on fatherhood is powered by the tenet established in Roe holding that reproductive choice and decision-making is the unquestionable sole right of women – the world required to cater to the manifest destiny of the female reproductive tract.
Roe is the basis on which, enhanced by women’s sole right to “choose” birth control and to subsequently marry or not marry; moved procreation from the cooperative realm of responsible marriage into a brave new world of willful welfarism which no one is permitted to question but everyone must pay for. Most politically-inclined men and women fall all over themselves in a race to enhance unrestrained sexual availability of women – and to subsequently force other men into peonage to it — but at the expense of their own marital and social futures. The blame is improperly placed at the feet of men, who in fact have little sway in the face of entitled feminist reproductive manifest destiny.
Contemporary Political Ramifications
On June 15th, Barak Obama harshly criticized poor fathers[8] for causing all the social problems of the black community – as if men have substantive control in matters of birth control and marriage.
Obama has staked his position on dangerous ground: he would continue mass sacrifices of young black men on the platter of entitled radical feminism — expanding a $612-billion federal enterprise — thus keeping the black family weak, broken, and living in urban violence. Barack Obama is one very dangerous Candy Man who intends to sacrifice the men of his own black community for political power. He must be avoided at all costs.
Senator John McCain is no better. Neither is Hillary, Giuliani, or Thompson. In fact, the only presidential candidates in either party who weighed in positively in this critical keystone electoral issue are Governor Mike Huckabee and Dr. Mark Klein.
Few members of Congress have honestly stepped up to the plate. In fact, the vast majority of them are chronic supporters of congressional false-paternalism, and do so against the wishes of thousands of Americans who contact them. America is not stupid: The latest Gallup poll shows Congressional approval at a new historic low of 14%,[9] a full 4% lower than the previous record. This is astonishingly poor for a newly-elected Congress. Congress must start serving America, not the reverse.
Marriage is the most important issue in the 2008 elections. The War on marriage is just as important as the war on terror – because this war has caused more casualties and human suffering of Americans right here on American soil than any other event in American history.
When marriage is important, abortion is not needed. When marriage is important, the child support state will become a bygone relic of the suffocating radical feminist entitlement era. When marriage is important, few women and children will live in poverty, and the working poor have a stronger socioeconomic foundation on which to base advancement.
We will reap exactly what we sow (and what we entitle). We must demand that politicians stop ramming the child-support state down our throats. We need programs that encourage and reward marital responsibility, and help spouses work through the common problems and processes of marriage and aging. The first party or presidential candidate to deliver on this need will win a landslide victory that makes the Republican takeover of 1994 look like Sputnik’s first flight.
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David R. Usher is Senior Policy Analyst for the True Equality Network and President of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, Missouri Coalition
[1] Lott, John R.; “It’s Not Enough to Be ‘Wanted’”, Wall Street Journal, June 19, 2007; http://opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110010227
[2] The Moynihan Report: 1960’s Black Families in Crisis; http://www.children.smartlibrary.org/newinterface/segment.cfm?segment=1804
[3] House Ways and Means Committee, Greenbook 2003. Federal Strategies To Reduce Nonmarital Pregnancies, Appendix M-1; http://waysandmeans.house.gov/media/pdf/greenbook2003/AppendixM.pdf
[4] Ibid., 3.
[5] Kupelian, David; “The war on fathers”, World Net Daily, October 9, 2006; http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52314
[6] Peterson, Rev. Jesse Lee; “Why Father’s Leave”, World Net Daily, June 16, 2007; http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=56214
[7] Baskerville, Stephen Ph.D.; “Taken Into Custody”, http://www.amazon.com/Taken-into-Custody-Fatherhood-Marriage/dp/1581825943
[8] The Houston Chronicle, “Obama Criticizes Absentee Fathers In Black Community”, June 15, 2007; http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/politics/4894888.html
[9] USA Today, June 20, 2007; http://blogs.usatoday.com/gallup/2007/06/what_do_hmos_an.html
| More from David R. Usher
Stumble It!
June 20th, 2007 at 6:55 am
David Usher wrote: Few women “accidentally” get pregnant out of wedlock. Birth control is more effective than at any time in human civilization.
This is so true and so often never brought up. Also, women can only get pregnant during the time of the month when they are ovulating. Men really don’t understand the entire Menstrual cycle of women. To put it simply if the egg isn’t there yet, it can’t get fertilized. There is a window of time for this to happen. Women who know their cycle; time it right and have unprotected sex during peak ovulation to insure pregnancy, then all of a sudden it’s an “accident.”
So you can not use any birth control at all called the “natural method” and a women won’t get pregnant if the “timing isn’t right.”
June 20th, 2007 at 7:55 am
Other interesting facts:
Natural Family Planning (The Rhythm Method)
The rhythm method (preventing pregnancy by avoiding intercourse during the fertile period) is also called natural family planning (NFP). The fertile period lasts about 4 days following ovulation, when the mature ovum travels through the fallopian tubes to the uterus and can be fertilized. There are three ways to predict the fertile period:
* The calendar method requires the woman to observe and take note of the length of her menstrual cycle for 6 to 12 months. She can estimate the first and last days of the fertile period by subtracting 18 from the length of the shortest cycle and 11 from the length of the longest cycle. If the shortest cycle is 28 days and her longest cycle is 32 days, the first and last days of the fertile period should be days 10 and 21. The first day of bleeding is considered day 1. So, in this example, the woman should abstain from sexual intercourse for 12 days, starting on the 10th day after the beginning of her menstrual cycle. The failure rate for this method is 40% (40 out of 100 women).
* The cervical mucus method, also known as the ovulation or Billing method, is an attempt to predict the fertile period by feeling and observing the cervical mucus in the vagina. Women using this method note the production of clear, watery mucus in the days immediately before ovulation. To avoid pregnancy, intercourse is avoided for several days following change in the color and consistency of cervical mucus.
* The symptothermal method uses a combination of the calendar and cervical mucus methods and the woman’s basal body temperature (BBT) to estimate the beginning and end of the fertile period. The first day is estimated by subracting 21 from the shortest menstrual cycle (the calendar method) or noting the first day of cervical mucus associated with ovulation (the cervical mucus method), whichever comes first. BBT is used to predict the end of the fertile period. The woman takes her temperature every morning and notes when body temperature rises, indicating that the corpus luteum is producing progesterone and ovulation has occurred. She can resume sexual intercourse 3 days after this so-called thermal shift. Devices that combine an electronic thermometer with a small computer are being tested in an effort to improve the accuracy of BBT as a predictor of the fertile phase.
June 20th, 2007 at 8:05 am
The horse has bolted. Any politician who aspires to high power in the USA isn’t going to criticise women or roll back Roe vs Wade. Fathers and men have proven to be a superb target as the polarising bad-guy.
It isn’t just America. The whole Anglophile world has bought the women’s vote. Like men who pander to women’s unreasonable and often outrageous whims and fancies, all the Western Nations are trapped in a cycle which can only end in tears and recrimination and dispossession.
The marriage of the People and its Government across the English speaking world, and beyond, is in free-fall to the divorce court, initiated, as ever, by women. Women are the National Children, to be given to the Almighty Government as the Primary, Custodial Parent.
The rot is firmly set in and our civilisation cannot be rescued by votes. The whole democracy thing has been aborted along with several million babies.
Things look bad right now. The writing is on the blogs. There is no room left on the wall. Our Institutions are irrevocably compromised. The women are subject to the effects of National and International Parental Alienation syndrome. The Child-women are turned against the fathers, by the very Politicians some people look to for salvation.
The darkness is falling and cold winds / hot winds, whatever your horror, are coming. Look into the broken hearts of the everyday fathers to see the pain and the anger and the demand for vengance.
There comes a time in any Nation or civilisation’s history and development when one can go no further without a wholesale change. This comes about with terrible initial consequences. We can see it coming, hear it, and people of good will and staunch faith in their ability to change situations peacefully and by consensus will struggle to order the tide to turn; people like you David.
Cnut was not a fool or full of hubris. He sat on his throne by the shore and gave his historical order to the waves, in order to show his Earls that there were limits even to a King’s powers. The tide cannot be turned.
America can shoulder much of the responsibility for the decline of the West. At its apogee of power and influence in the 50’s and 60’s when the world was exhausted by half a century of war, and America was the light of the world, it succumbed to Hubris, taking leadership in a Block of institutional democratic nations, and led them into the abyss.
It’s power and influence is waning, squandered, and it will not be able to effect a rescue even of itself. It will have run out of babies. It will have dispossessed and ejected the men.
There will have to be a revolution in Heaven and on Earth before the mess we have made will be changed. It will get a lot worse before whatever comes after, comes.
June 20th, 2007 at 9:07 am
You are correct Mr. Usher.
You stated: When marriage is important, the child support state will become a bygone relic of the suffocating radical feminist entitlement era.
True. But the very first thing they teach in college women’s studies courses is that marriage is enslavement for women. Marriage must be destroyed! And we now have singles outnumbering married couples in many states (enacting selfish legislation on parental notification – WHEN THEY DON’T EVEN HAVE KIDS!!)
Abortion seduces as the “backup” – even when the woman never intends to use it.
You are so correct in stating that women that do not want to get pregnant, do not get pregnant.
June 20th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
david..glad to see you weathered the storm…
You said it best when you said men are hurting right now, and some vent poisin all over the place, some even at men who are fighting for them.
And after a period of venting the poisin, most turn into active effective mens right activists..
we all must get used to riding the storm out….
June 20th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
I only aw this ad briefly on front of MND. I emailed the link to talk rasio hosts I know. It deserves more publicity, but looks like MND format has changed
http://thewaragainstmen.com/_wsn/page4.html
June 20th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
The last paragraph of the column refers to a great Republican victory occurring in 1992. Wasn’t it actually in 1994?
June 20th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
John, thanks for catching the typo.
June 22nd, 2007 at 1:01 pm
I already know that this nation is headed for a bad crash. When.. not if it comes , it is going to be bad. The only good thing is that current “mess” will be gone and all the trouble makers.. feminism,socialism, communism, and finally atheism will go out with a bang.
I forsee a world were common sense is one again supreme and the idiocy is no longer tolerated . We go back to a system of law, ie right and wrong. The corrupt legal system will be gone and the terrorist who operated it will either be dead or running so hard to avoid that fate, that they won’t be a problem anymore.
so oneday will have , not a perfect world, just a world that is not as messed up and the current one is ! I will sit back an drink a cold beer
June 22nd, 2007 at 2:49 pm
I will be filing a federal petition against York County DRS, PA for violating there own child support laws. As one of my requests to the judge is that Roe V. Wade be overturned on the grounds that it forces men to be accountable for the decissions of another party. Row v. Wade has been upheld because a woman has a right to privacy, but in many other cases a persons right to privacy is negated if their actions and decissions adversly affect another party.
I will also be asking that the current child support system be ruled unconstitutional as a child has the right to be supported by both parents, but the current system only enforces what one parent is doing that is clearly a violation of the child’s right to be supported by both parents.
If anyone knows of a good civil rights lawyer that is friendly to the cause get a hold of me. As far as I am concerned talk is cheap if you are not willing to step up and fight for your rights then shut the fuck up you deserve what you get.
June 24th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
BismarkPA,
Your formulation that “a child has the right to be supported by both parents” is erroneous. Wrong. Incorrect. Incompatible with the formulation of rights in the Constitution.
There is only ONE right in the Constiution that places an obligation on anybody else, and that is the right to trial by jury. The right of free expression does not obligate anybody to pay for somebody else’s soapbox. The right of privacy does not require the taxpayer to fund other folk’s safety deposit boxes, etc…
Finally, your two grounds are incompatible with one another. By arguing that men shouldn’t be held accountable for the decisions of another party, then turning around arguing that a child has the right to be supported by both parents, you’re nullifying the first argument. Think this through in the realm of no-fault divorce.