The Male/Female Problematic and Out of Wedlock Births

by Helen Alvaré, J.D., Senior Fellow in Law, and Ruth Institute Advisory Board Member 

This is a follow-up to Helen's article featured last week, "The Government Wants You...To Stay in Love...What?"

In my last column, I concluded that while public and private actors have taken many different and sometimes logical approaches to reducing out of wedlock pregnancies, they have also missed a crucial aspect of the problem: the difficulties men and women are experiencing in their relationships with one another, as evidenced by their unwillingness to commit to one another, even after a baby is conceived. 

These difficulties surface particularly in qualitative studies/narrative accounts of individual and unmarried-couple single parents. They are also logically apparent, based upon the real differences between the meanings and consequences of decisions about sex and commitment, as between the unmarried and the married.  In other words, the very structure of nonmarital childbearing   -- i.e. sex within an uncommitted relationship – and as compared with marital childbearing, indicates that the process is very likely to foster (and sustain) conflicts between men and women, and ill effects for their children.

In order to think about who and what might help men and women, I will set out in detail the elements of their present “difficulties,” as gleaned both from their own narratives (usually as told to researchers,( See, e.g. Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage, 2005; Paula England and Kathryn Edin, Unmarried Couples with Children (2000)), and from what is logically implied by a willingness to have an intimate, heterosexual relationship (thus risking conception) without a prior and certain commitment. In a later and final column on this subject, I will suggest which institutions could help, and how they might proceed despite significant impediments to success.

In the most complete narratives revealing the minds of single mothers or unmarried parent-couples, there is very little said about the decision to engage in sex with the other parent.  It is almost as if it is not worthy of discussion or debate. One gets the sense, as I suggested in an earlier column, that it is not a decision bearing moral significance for them.  There is rather an attraction to the other person, and then there is sex (fairly so, too) as part of this.  (See, e.g. Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage, 2005; Paula England and Kathryn Edin, Unmarried Couples with Children(2000);  Christine Coppa, Rattled! A Memoir (2009);  Betty Holt, Single Motherhood by Choice (2003);  Margaret K. Nelson, The Social Economy of Single Motherhood: Raising Children in Rural America (2005)).

Regarding the subject of commitment, unmarried parents have a whole lot more to say.  Females, or both partners, will say they are too young (and they are often very young).  Or they will note that the other party is not earning enough to make a marriage possible, or maybe even the wedding they have in mind.  Females in particular also regularly claim that the males are not working hard enough or are not actively looking for work, and that they rely on the females for all housing and food resources.  Females often say that the males doesn’t seem sufficiently interested in taking care of the baby or of the mothers, who are shouldering significant responsibilities. Females comment also that the males don’t seem to understand that life has completely changed for the adults, now that there is a child to care for.

Sacrifices of time and money, of “hanging out” with friends on the corner, have to be made.  Females also regularly claim that the man is not trustworthy sexually, or is inclined too easily to resort to criminal activity. Males will often retort that the females aren’t sexually faithful either, but are simply looking for a deep pocket to bear child support costs.  Females also express a fear of relying for emotional and financial support upon the males they once had sex with. They worry about being left in the lurch on both counts, and about ceding some authority to him too, not wanting to be left scrambling for safety at some time in the future.  The females have an often used expression that they can “do bad” on their own….they don’t need to “do bad” while being drained emotionally and financially by a man.  (See Paula England and Kathryn Edin, Unmarried Couples with Children (2000)).

There are also the things that the males and the females are not articulating out loud, but which are “said” by their behaviors, particularly if you contrast these with similar behaviors in a marital context.

By the lack of discussion about the decision to embark on a sexual relationship, and by the frequent practice of having multiple sex partners even during their adolescence, both males and females are saying that they don’t see sex as a terribly significant decision. One doesn’t have to be older or more reasonable or more knowledgeable to do it. This, despite psychological studies demonstrating that sex is linked with significant emotional and intellectual effects, particularly among young women, and despite the long-term effects suffered by men and women alike from sexually-transmitted diseases.