Men who walk out on pregnancies leave behind a trail of poverty, crime and illiteracy

Keith Pounds:

According to the South Carolina Commission for Minority Affairs' 2004 Statistical Profile, 31 percent of all children in South Carolina under the age of 18 live in single-parent families; 52 percent of African-American children and 19 percent of white children. Of all females in the state who give birth, 40.1 percent are single; 68.9 percent of African Americans and 11.1 percent of Caucasian mothers.

"Eighty-five percent of all poor black children live in fatherless families" meaning that "the poverty rate for black children without fathers is nearly six times that for black children with two parents," writes David Horowitz, an early Black Panther supporter, in his 1999 book, "Hating Whitey."

In his controversial 2002 speech during the NAACP commemoration of Brown vs. Board of Education, actor Bill Cosby decried the fact that: "No longer is a person embarrassed because they're pregnant without a husband. No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father."

In the 1984 book, "Losing Ground," Charles Murray wrote that "illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of our time -- more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare, or homelessness because it drives everything else."

Children of both sexes from father-absent families are more likely to divorce, Murray said. Boys without dads also have difficulty with pair bonding and have decreased drive and ambition, and girls have higher rates of illegitimate pregnancy themselves, he added. Other sources point out the prominence of young girls from fatherless homes who "carry on the cycle" by having their own children out of wedlock at a younger-than-average age.

Multiple statistical sources show children raised in single-parent, female-headed households are six times more likely than children with two-parent homes to be poor, and that males of all races, reared in such an environment, are responsible for 70 percent of youth violence.

Among northeast Asians, only about 10 children are born to unwed mothers per 1,000 births. These rates correlate directly with their higher rates of marriage and extended families, lower divorce rate, lower infant mortality and lower rates of drug, alcohol or tobacco use during pregnancy, even among poor Asians.

In "Promises I Keep; Why Poor Women put Motherhood before Marriage," Allison DeMarco looks at the decrease in need for government help among two-parent families because of the increase in income when both work. She cites a study which shows that poor, unmarried women often insist they don't "devalue" marriage; they simply make the "personal choice to postpone marriage until they are ready."

The study raises the question of why these mothers didn't likewise make the personal choice to postpone having babies. As DeMarco elaborates, and statistics clearly show, "early births to poor, unwed mothers is clearly detrimental to the lives of the children."

Among the 40 percent of black children who are poor, 85 percent come from single-parent homes. Horowitz suggests this circumstance leaves these children at a disadvantage in educational opportunities, specifically in college and university competition, and even in the job market. He writes that by the time many of these children are ready for higher education, or job seeking, "they may suffer from dysfunctional behaviors, or have developed disabling habits, or have internalized cultural attitudes hostile to academic achievement, or simply lack the supportive environment a middle-class home provides."

This, Horowitz suggests, accounts for the high dropout rates among affirmative action students.

He blames present-day civil rights groups for not marching and calling for "protests" against bad parenting, drug dealers, hate-filled rap music and failing schools and for not supporting strong marriages of two-parent families to keep children out of poverty. This culture of failure, he writes, involves "self-defeating stereotypes that reduce black people to violent, oversexed 'gangstas,' minstrel show comedians and mindless athletes" who "embrace the notion of victimhood."

The 1994 Color of Crime Report found that of the 1,700,000 interracial crimes committed that year, 90 percent (1,140,670) were committed by blacks against whites. Of those black-on-white crimes, 173,374 were robberies and the remaining 84.8 percent were assaults and rapes. These statistics reveal the uncomfortable fact that blacks are twice as likely as whites to commit hate crimes and more than 250 times more likely to commit them against whites than are whites against blacks.

Other figures include that black males represent 70 percent of defendants in violent juvenile cases, 60 percent of juvenile murder defendants, 72 percent of rape defendants, 78 percent of robbery defendants, and 61 percent of assault defendants. As Horowitz suggests, rather than blaming these statistics on "profiling," it may be more effective to realize that these numbers could stem from the fact that of the 31,000 or so gangs in the United States, with membership numbers of about one million, 80 percent of those members are Hispanic or black.

The statistics cited above are especially alarming when considering that the absence of fathers during their children's developmental years correlates directly with increased violence and crime.

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