Shooter: By the way look at how legitimizing unwed motherhood worked out... Unwed motherhood (around 30% of all children) is strongly correlated with poverty and inability to marry.

You are an idiot. Go away.

January 04, 2002

Going Solo

Unwed motherhood in industrial nations rises

By Rodger Doyle

Forty years ago unmarried mothers accounted for only 5 percent of births in western Europe and English-speaking countries; today that proportion is about 30 percent. The increase has been accompanied by the spread of cohabitation, more so in Europe than in the U.S., and indeed in some regions, such as Scandinavia, the distinction between legal marriage and cohabitation has been fading.

The causes of this historic development are even now not fully understood, at least in its American manifestation, but increased sexual permissiveness beginning after World War II is surely involved. Also among the developments that may have contributed to the rise in unwed motherhood in the U.S. is the loss, beginning in the 1960s, of relatively unskilled but well-paying manufacturing jobs. In working-class neighborhoods, young men capable of supporting a family became ever more scarce. Black men, who were just starting to participate in the industrial economy in the 1940s and 1950s, found it particularly difficult to get good jobs. Yet according to one estimate, the lack of decent jobs cannot explain more than a fifth of the nonmarital births among black Americans.

A second development may have magnified nonmarital births--the growing number of women who are financially independent and thus able to have children on their own. But the evidence suggests that single mothers by choice are, at best, a minor contributor to the out-of-wedlock trend. Other explanations, such as the growth of welfare, are not well supported by research.

Some unmarried women who became mothers did not use contraceptives, and many who did found them ineffective. The Pill and condoms have failure rates of 9 and 15 percent, respectively, and among younger women, the unmarried and minorities, the rates are higher still. It is not surprising that 55 percent of all births among unmarried women and two thirds of those among teenagers, as noted in a 1994 U.S. survey, were unintended.

Compared with Canada and western Europe, the U.S. is in the middle range in births to unmarried women, but among adolescents U.S. rates are much higher [see table at left]. Teenage motherhood is particularly problematic because most girls lack parenting skills and don't have the resources to bring up children properly. In most western countries, but not the U.S., there is a strong consensus that adolescents should not bear children. American adolescents are less apt than those in other countries to use contraceptives and may not use them as effectively.

Western Europeans and Canadians generally provide better access to family-planning programs for teenagers. In France, for example, nurses in public and parochial high schools dispense the "morning-after pill," a practice unheard of in the U.S.

In Japan, where nonmarital births are extremely rare, unwed mothers and their children are severely stigmatized, even to the point of denying them benefits available to married mothers. In Europe, countries with large Catholic populations tend to have fewer nonmarital births, although France is a major exception. In Scandinavia, a traditionally strong Protestant region, the rate of nonmarital childbearing is the highest in Europe.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?colID=19&articleID=000036CD-B004-1C83-B0DB809EC588EF21

Sometime around 1747 the text of a speech delivered by a woman accused of having sexual intercourse out of wedlock began to attract a great deal of attention in Europe. The woman was named Polly Baker, and the evidence that she had committed the crime she was accused of was fairly compelling: she had just given birth, and she was unmarried.

The speech was a transcript of Polly Baker's statement to the trial judges. It opened with Polly declaring her hope that she would be spared a fine, as she had already paid a fine four times for this supposed crime.

Polly then argued that while she was obviously guilty of the crime, the law itself was unreasonable. She said, "I have brought five fine children into the world at the risk of my life... I have maintained them well by my own industry, without burdening the township, and would have done it better if it had not been for the heavy charges and fines I have paid."

Moreover, she argued, why was she being punished, while the men who had committed the crime with her were let off scot free? She would have preferred to marry, but none of her partners had been honorable enough to ask her. So why was she being punished for what was really their crime? Her only real crime, she declared, was that she was too trusting and naive.

Finally, Polly argued, hers was a religious offense, not a secular one. "You believe I have offended heaven and must suffer eternal fire. Will not that be sufficient? What need is there, then, of your additional fines and whipping?"

Polly ended the speech by declaring that instead of fining her, the judges should erect a statue in her honor.

The story had a happy ending, because not only did the court declare her innocent, but one of the judges asked her hand in marriage the next day. In some versions of the story Polly proceeded to have fifteen legitimate children with this judge.

It is not clear where this speech was first printed. Its first known appearance was in a London paper, the General Advertiser, on April 15, 1747, but it could have appeared elsewhere earlier. Many other papers in Europe and America eventually reprinted it, and the speech became a great sensation. Everyone accepted it as a true account of a real event.

However, thirty years later Benjamin Franklin confessed that he had written the speech. The speech never appeared in the paper he was editing in 1747, the Pennsylvania Gazette, but if Franklin did write the speech, his intention was probably to draw attention to the unfairness of the law which punished mothers, but not fathers, for having children out of wedlock.

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/polly_baker.html