The end of fatherhood

The surge in births to single women may be the single largest socioeconomic disaster in the past eighty years.

COMMENTARY BY

Terence Jeffrey@TerryJeffrey Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor in chief of CNSNews.com.

In 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II, there were 2,515,427 babies born in this country. Of those babies, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 95,700—or 3.8%—were born to unmarried mothers.

The traditional family led by a mother and father was a foundational fact of American culture. In 1945, the percentage of babies born to unmarried mothers rose to 4.3%. But, by 1946, the first full year after the war, it dropped back down to 3.8%. The traditional family survived. Then in the 1950s, the percentage of American babies born to unmarried mothers began to slowly tick upward, hitting 5.2% by the end of that decade.

By 1969, as this column has noted in reviewing these numbers before, 10% of American babies were born to unmarried mothers. In 2008, it surpassed 40%.

In 10 of the last 13 years on record (2008 through 2020), it has surpassed 40%—and in the three years that it did not surpass 40%, it never dropped below 39.6%.

In fact, in the 13 years from 2008 through 2020, there were 51,138,204 babies born in this country, according to the CDC, and 20,642,649 of those babies (or 40.36%) were born to unmarried mothers.

This is the simple, obvious reason that progressives and leftist extremists (e.g., BLM) want to separate children from families at birth: To transfer responsibility for raising children from fathers and mothers to the state, usually in single-parent (almost exclusively female led) homes or as wards of the state, making fatherhood obsolete other than as a source of sperm. This frees men of the responsibility of children, reinforcing and institutionalizing the fatherless family model.