What's Wrong With Single Moms?

The Brits are having a media frenzy over a family of single moms. Julie, single mother of three girls
is now the proud grandmother of three grandchildren, one each from her daughters, who became single mothers at age 12, 14, and 16.
What’s wrong with that, asks aging feminist
Germaine Greer?

What indeed? Apart from the trifling $50,000 a year in various government benefits.

Let us leave aside the merely aesthetic and the economic, the culturally determined distate for
bastardy, and the probability that the children of “lone parents” are less likely to get a
good education and contribute to society. Let us think about safety.

Did you know, Ms Greer, that the child of a woman who is living unmarried with a man who is not the child’s
father is 33 times more likely to suffer physical harm than a child living with its married, natural
parents? You can find the numbers in James Bartholomew’s
The Welfare State We’re In, page 271. Not impressed?

Well, let us put the argument in another way. Suppose that a social scientist published a study showing that the
children of fundamentalist Christians were 33 times more likely to suffer physical abuse
during childhood than average. Who can doubt that the author of the study would be on the Today show the very next
day and that Katie Couric would be interviewing her with deeply furrowed brow? And who can doubt that
Democrats would be sponsoring legislation within days to “make our children safe?”

Yet here we have data that show that children being raised outside of marriage are significantly less
safe, and that children in a house with a man not their father face an increased risk of 3,300 percent. Yet
the liberal experts and the liberal activists and the liberal legislators and the liberal media celebrities are strangely silent. What is going on?