Some of the most recent discourse on Twitter concerns a few books that basically state that kids who grow up in two-parent households have better life outcomes than those who grow up in single-parent households. About a week ago, Matthew Yglesias tweeted this, and all hell broke loose so to speak.
A lot of the people in the replies and quote tweets bring up Charles Murray’s argument, that elites don’t practice what they preach, but I think the truth is more complicated than that, and fair warning, despite being an elite liberal™, I don’t really take the elite liberal stance on this topic (and many others).
Here’s my take:
Conservatives theoretically want to shame AND punish anybody who diverges from the norm, the norm in this case being heterosexual monogamous marriage and children by the early 30s (or thereabouts) without being fat, in debt, or with a lot of bad habits. So, single mothers on welfare and the nonworking poor and “ethically non-monogamous” LGBT people all get the shaft not only socially but also materially.
Liberals theoretically do not want to punish those who diverge from the norm but also, they want to destigmatize divergence and bring about acceptance
However, my personal hypothesis is that a lot of liberals fall into a third group, which doesn’t actively want to punish those who diverge from the norm but internally judges their behavior harshly and would never want their own children or friends or family members to engage in it. But, due to social stigma, these same liberals also virtue signal online about how they don’t judge, which is where they get a lot of pushback.
For instance, women without a college degree and from lower income households generally have children earlier than women with a college degree, and divorce rates are higher among lower income groups than they are among the elite. We can and should talk about how abortion being illegal on a federal level contributes to higher birth rates among the poor but also, Dobbs v. Jackson happened in 2022, and even before that point, this phenomenon was prevalent. The uncomfortable reality is that having children has a major opportunity cost, not only physically and emotionally but also financially. One major reason that college educated women, especially in big cities, put off having kids until their late 20s/early-mid 30s is that they have a life outside the home, and quite frankly, a lot of women without a college degree don’t.
When women have a high school degree, or even a year or two of college, their earning potential as an individual is severely capped. The majority of jobs that allow for a middle class life without a college degree involve extensive manual labor, unionized jobs that women can’t do, so the majority of women without a college degree are either poor or financially dependent on a man. The thought process goes, if I’m only going to ever make $40k/year no matter what I do what incentive does I have to put off children, even if my partner is a deadbeat? Children bring happiness, a sense of purpose, and are a source of joy for parents, even more so if they have little else bringing them joy in their lives. And besides, where are they meant to find better guys? It’s not like the men who are in their social circles are doing any better than they are so they may as well accept their lot in life.
Incidentally, this is also why women without college degrees are also more lax with birth control than college educated women. For a college educated woman, there’s a huge opportunity cost to an unwanted pregnancy even if abortion is legal, and since non-college women generally have less material means, they have less to gain, and also have less to lose. Children are expensive, pregnancies aren’t easy on women’s bodies, and having a baby means you can’t have a cocktail in a year. But, if you were already stuck in a small town in a dead end job, maybe with a guy you kind of like who you think will stick around, what do you really have to lose by having a child, maybe a couple years before you wanted to?
I’m not saying these things to be cruel or unfair, and I fully support the government providing monetary benefits to poor single mothers in addition to making abortion and birth control accessible (and obviously, legal). But those are some of the reasons that working class women have kids earlier and have more of them, and conversely, that’s why the right-wing demonizes those same mothers. One major reason that conservatives opposed giving cash payments to poor mothers, especially poor mothers who aren’t working, is that they argue it would incentivize women to have kids they can’t afford, and that logic, among many other reasons, is why welfare reform passed.
Moreover, liberals are aware of this human sentiment even if they pretend they’re not. It’s why pro-choice advocates rarely use examples of poor single mothers in their 30s who forgot to use a condom but can’t afford another child to drum up sympathy to their cause. They use preteen rape victims, married mothers who have ectopic pregnancies, or successful CEOs in their 50s who had abortions as teenagers. The uncomfortable truth is that most people aren’t naturally sympathetic to people who get into bad but ultimately avoidable situations
Liberals counter assessments like this with statements like “nobody WANTS to be a poor mother” or they’ll single mindedly blame abortion being banned for women having children they can’t afford. But, once again, this phenomenon has been going on long before June 2022 when Roe got overturned and moreover, people have agency to make choices that are detrimental to their lives in the long term, even though they still don’t deserve to be poor and hungry. It’s just difficult for people to simultaneously hold those two ideas in their heads.
I think that liberals have an instinctive tendency to unilaterally blame systemic issues for individuals’ problems and in turn, they’re simply incapable of holding individuals accountable in fair and legitimate ways. (The converse to this, of course, is that conservatives are inclined to blame systemic failures on individual actors, but that’s a topic for another newsletter.) The point is, gun to head, everybody knows exactly why poor women are having kids at higher rates than rich women, regardless of whether they’re married, but when presented with this topic on a public forum like Twitter, wealthy liberals equivocate since they know perfectly well they would personally never make those choices and would never want their kids to make those choices, and they bend over backwards to pretend that they don’t judge when they actually do. And that, I think, is why this particular attitude is so off-putting to a lot of people. They dislike dishonesty but also, they’d dislike brutal honesty of the sort I’m displaying in this newsletter, so as a society, we’re kind of at an impasse.
A central tenet of contemporary liberalism is equating marginalization with virtue, but the uncomfortable reality is that people who are marginalized on one or more axes can and do make bad choices, just like everybody else. This doesn’t mean people deserve to suffer and don’t deserve to feel joy, but it means that if you publicly imply or outrightly declare that certain individuals or groups don’t have agency, you’ll get a lot of pushback. There are always different choices people can make, and I guess at the end of the day, we all have to live with the consequences of our decisions, for better or for worse.
I agree with your article but I would like to add that LARCs significantly reduced the birth rate among unmarried women. A lot of these pregnancies are unplanned and due to birth control failures and better birth control helps.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/08/13/birth-rate-for-unmarried-women-declining-for-first-time-in-decades/