Drawing on the experiences of her alter ego Prudence, she's the header on Slate today, asserting that "out of wedlock births are a national catastrophe." In a nutshell, and in her words,
"perhaps in our desire not to make moral judgments about personal choices, young women wholly unprepared to be mothers are not getting the message that there are dire consequences of having (unprotected) sex with guys too lame to be fathers."
I first processed the argument through the lens of those asinine "Married People Earn More Money" bus shelter posters around town, which seem to be to advertise nothing so much as "The Campaign for Our Children's" inability to separate correlation and causation. But Yoffee makes some compelling - and well substantiated - points for Team Marriage and exposes that the whole unmarried mother phenomenon is a socioeconomic issue more than a feminist issue. I was floored by the Rutgets statistic she sites, that "only 4 percent of college graduates have children out of wedlock." (a quick search shows that research from the CDC and from the Center for Immigration Studies substantiate a figure somewhere between 4 and 7%)
Which raises the question, I think, of the intellectual honesty of decrying the sexism or regressiveness of advocates for marriage (to which I certainly plead guilty), when most children born out of wedlock "start out without a stable cushion in life," as Yoffee phrases it - as in, a resource cushion, totally apart from any psychological or moral arguments for a two parent home.
Not, of course, that any marriage is better than none - she's as quick to take exception to that idea as I am - and definitely not that unwed mothers deserve censure or ostracization, but while single motherhood continues to be a constitutive element of the cycle of poverty, maybe we should reexamine our cheerleading for a "modern culture" that rejects an institution representing a legal and sociological support framework for a newborn human.
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