Mothers Should Not be Forced into Drastic Action to Establish Their Rights

Whether or not it’s 51% or 47% of women living alone with no husband, the bottom line remains essentially the same. Millions of women are essentially going to be spending a good part of their lives alone. So in recognition of this fact, public policy must begin reflecting the way we actually live today. We cannot continue ignoring this reality.

Thus, we need to begin making our society welcoming to these millions of single women if they wish to become mothers. Women shouldn’t have to go to all these extreme measures, such as being forced to spend thousands of dollars to establish themselves as custodial in the legalized version of a dog and pony show, or be forced to renounce their US citizenship ala Anne Nicole Smith. All of this in an attempt to establish legal rights to our own children; to establish rights which should belong to every mother automatically. Not something subject to litigation in order to keep our children out of the hands of greedy recreational sperm donors.

Nor should these women be subjected to vicious fathers’ rights propaganda after they have their children, trying to guilt trip them about what horrible people they are because they decided to become single mothers. This is nothing but spin to enable men to undermine the natural rights all mothers have always had to their own children.

It’s simply out-freaking-rageous that this be allowed to go on today.

Sadly the so-called advocates of womens’ rights have ignored these issues, too busy focusing on ways to further their own career ambitions. In their attempts to social engineer a gender neutral society, feminism has signed away the rights of mothers to their children. A right I might add far older then both feminism and the courts of men combined and a right I might add which was not theirs to give away.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/opinion/11pubed.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2

Can a 15-Year-Old Be a ‘Woman Without a Spouse’?

By BYRON CALAME

Published: February 11, 2007

The opening paragraph of the article sounded like grown-up stuff: “For what experts say is probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one, according to a New York Times analysis of census results.”

It was a statistic that put the story on a fast track to the front page, providing a noteworthy benchmark for a well-established trend. But the new majority materialized only because The Times chose to use survey data that counted, as spouseless women, teenagers 15 through 17 — almost 90 percent of whom were living with their parents.

Major newspapers and broadcast and cable news programs picked up on this tipping point, spotted by Sam Roberts, a veteran Times reporter who writes frequently about census data. A few media outlets stopped to question the logic of including teenage females, before going on to discuss the Jan. 16 article’s interesting exploration of the “newfound freedom” for women that was reflected by the new majority.

Several readers, including some who perceived the article as an attack on family values, challenged the inclusion of 15-year-olds, in e-mails to me and in comments posted on the Web version of The Times. “The article is a little deceiving because it is based on the percentage of women 15 and older who are not married,” wrote one reader, noting that “it’s not even legal to marry at 15” in many states. I couldn’t agree more.

Common sense would also seem to have called for telling readers how many women above high school age were living without spouses in 2005. Simply subtracting the numbers for the A.C.S.’s 15-to-17 category from the total provides the data for females 18 and older. It shows that 48 percent of them were living without husbands — short of the 51 percent reached when high-school-age females were included — a fact that merited equal billing in the article. Eliminating all teenagers and counting only women 20 and older would have shown that 47 percent were living without a spouse in 2005, according to my math.

After dealing with three weeks of questions from readers and from me, Mr. Roberts on Monday expressed a little less certainty about the new majority trumpeted in the first paragraph of his article. He wrote to me: “I think the essence of the article remains accurate: that, depending on how one adjusts the census’s definition, about half — maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit less, depending on the age group —of American women are living without a spouse at any given time.”