Ross Douthat made waves last year when he joined the New York Times as a columnist. A social conservative, Douthat’s views are generally well to the right of both the paper’s editorial positions, as well as those of its star pundits such as Maureen Dowd, Nicholas Kristof, Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman.
Today, Douthat wrestles with what must be an uncomfortable truth for any righty: “blue states” tend to have a better track record on family values than “red ones.” (For background, see this Pew report and this National Journal article). Douthat:
…from divorce rates to teen births, nearly every indicator of family life now varies dramatically by education, race, geography and income.
In a rare convergence, conservatives and liberals basically agree on how this happened. First, the sexual revolution overturned the old order of single-earner households, early marriages, and strong stigmas against divorce and unwed motherhood. In its aftermath, the professional classes found a new equilibrium. Today, couples with college and (especially) graduate degrees tend to cohabit early and marry late, delaying childbirth and raising smaller families than their parents, while enjoying low divorce rates and bearing relatively few children out of wedlock.
For the rest of the country, this comfortable equilibrium remains out of reach. In the underclass (black, white and Hispanic alike), intact families are now an endangered species. For middle America, the ideal of the two-parent family endures, but the reality is much more chaotic: early marriages coexist with frequent divorces, and the out-of-wedlock birth rate keeps inching upward.
Douthat and his allies are in a pickle. Clearly, the widespread availability of abortion and contraception have not led to the decline of those families whose members are most likely to support access to these two critical rights. The dichotomy is stark: those most likely to pay lip service to family values (and to vote Republican) are those whose personal choices are most at odds with those same values. Those most likely to delay having children — but to have children in wedlock — are those whose politics lean left. Even more simply, the evidence is stark that access to safe and legal abortion and effective methods of contraception have strengthened rather than weakened “traditional families”. What a painful conundrum for conservatives to confront!
To be clear, I don’t agree with Douthat that the rise in single-parent households is lamentable. The reality is more nuanced. To the extent that the rising numbers of babies born to unmarried women reflects the happy reality that the stigma against “illegitimacy” is waning, that’s cause for at least as much celebration as sorrow. To the extent that community networks and social programs can reduce women’s reliance on unstable or abusive male partners, this is also a good thing. (When it comes to understanding poor women’s choices about reproduction and marriage, there’s no better resource than the magisterial Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage , which I reviewed here.)
From the progressive perspective, marriage ought to be a choice rooted in mutual desire rather than a necessity rooted in desperation. Better fewer marriages, but happier ones — that’s a reasonable goal. And it’s a goal that, as Douthat notes, a fair number of “blue state” Americans have pursued successfully. But he suggests that the price of all of this stability and happiness has been too high:
Liberals sometimes argue that their preferred approach to family life reduces the need for abortion. In reality, it may depend on abortion to succeed. The teen pregnancy rate in blue Connecticut, for instance, is roughly identical to the teen pregnancy rate in red Montana. But in Connecticut, those pregnancies are half as likely to be carried to term. Over all, the abortion rate is twice as high in New York as in Texas and three times as high in Massachusetts as in Utah.
So it isn’t just contraception that delays childbearing in liberal states, and it isn’t just a foolish devotion to abstinence education that leads to teen births and hasty marriages in conservative America. It’s also a matter of how plausible an option abortion seems, both morally and practically, depending on who and where you are.
Shorter Douthat: you liberals may be healthier and wealthier and happier, but y’all had to kill your poor blessed babies to achieve these fine things, so you ought to feel ashamed of yourselves.
It’s obvious that the abortion rate is going to be higher in New York and Massachusetts than in Texas or Utah. The reason isn’t the laudable values of rural Texans or Utahns: it’s the inaccessibilty of abortion in the latter states thanks to onerous laws passed by anti-choice legislators seeking to subvert Roe v. Wade. As any historian of sexual behavior knows, you can never attribute to moral conviction what can be much better explained by lack of access. If it’s virtue, it’s a virtue that’s as much coerced as chosen.
My wife and I have a happy and stable marriage. We’re leading what most people would consider to be a very comfortable life. We have our advanced degrees, our home, our careers. We have an adored and well-cared-for child, born when I was in my early forties and my wife in her mid-thirties. We also had sexual pasts with other people. Contraception — and in my case, access to abortion — have been indispensable factors in the happy outcome of our lives to date. There is no shame in acknowledging that. My wife, who was born into real poverty, is the first member of her family to graduate college; she is the first woman in her family in generations to have her first baby after age thirty — and after getting married. Without stigmatizing those whose choices were different, it’s safe to say (and my wife is clear on the matter) that the assiduous use of birth control in various forms was a key component of her own rise to the middle-class.
As we mark the fiftieth anniversary of the coming of the Pill, and as we see troubling encroachments on women’s bodily autonomy in “red state” legislatures across the nation, we need to be reminded of three basic truths, truths supported by all the recent demographic evidence. One, that prosperity and access to family planning are inextricably linked worldwide; two, that the extraordinary success American women have enjoyed in gaining access to traditionally male spaces is at least partly contingent on contraception; three, that those who are most likely to enjoy sexual freedom while they are young often become those most likely to create stable and happy families when they are older.
This is worth repeating.
This is worth fighting for.
Hugo,
Both you and Douthat ignore an essential, second half of Naomi Cahn and June Carbone’s research (which forms the basis for the studies and articles you cite): namely, that it’s not just the pill that created a cultural rift in how different American families develop, it was also globalization. The evaporation of low-level but well-paying jobs that were, at one time, much more readily accessible to the male wage-earners in families which, in early decades, had far fewer cultural and legal options available to them, and thus went ahead and married and fell into “traditional” family models fairly early, has had massive consequences. Absent the work which provided some rough stabilization, the stresses of married life, particularly early married life, had major consequences on the survivability of those marriages. Thus does the economic importance of not falling into “traditional” models too early become all that much more clearly manifest to young people, and to their own kids as time passes.
Consequently, the “three basic truths” you conclude with are incomplete, and thus don’t entirely hold together. Yes, “prosperity and access to family planning are inextricably linked worldwide”; and yes, “the extraordinary success American women have enjoyed in gaining access to traditionally male spaces is at least partly contingent on contraception.” But the connection you make between “enjoy[ing] sexual freedom while…young” and “creat[ing] stable and happy families” doesn’t hold. You’re implying that sexual freedom provides the condition for stable and happy families, and that might well be the case…but the demographic data doesn’t support it. What it supports is, when the socio-economic structure removes the economic incentive to attach oneself to traditional models of sexual morality, then of course most people won’t do so, and will find other ways of living their lives. That those lives seem to often involve “stable and happy families” is a great good, and if those in those families–like your own–understand themselves to have had the ability to form said families because of their prior sexual freedom, that’s an important data point. But the one perspective doesn’t prove what the data shows.
Russell, fair enough — I was drawing out Douthat’s own rather muddled argument, which did seem to support my third conclusion. I chose the qualifier “often” to suggest correlation, but not causation.
I’m about 1/3 of the way through Cahn and Carbone’s book. They make the point in several places that the “blue family” model is a mix of public tolerance with private discipline – that their sexual ethic locates discipline in planning for and managing the consequences of sexual behavior which translates into having access to and using contraception, planning for the chance that you might need the morning after pill and/or access to abortion.
They make the point – repeatedly – that economic changes have negatively impacted red families, but they also point out that for those families, adopting the blue family model would be beneficial – the red family is caught in a feedback loop that exacerbates rather than ameliorates their pressures.
They also point out that what’s happening is a transition from one model of family to another that is incomplete. Where the red model is prevalent and supported on all sides, it works, where the blue model is prevalent and supported on all it sides, it works. There just aren’t many places where the red model is receiving that kind of support.
Clearly, I need to do more than read reviews. Glen, I love that phrase “public tolerance and private discipline”. That’s exactly it, and exactly the values with which I was raised.
I think it’s well worth the read. However, if you have read Stephanie Coontz, Elaine Tyler May, and Lakoff, you have a pretty good idea of a lot of their background material – it’s their analysis that sets the book apart.
One question that always comes to my mind with this issue is how the “blue” model can successfully reproduce itself, in a very literal sense. Later marriage and childbirth usually means having less than two children, on average (in other words, being below replacement level). That makes for a shrinking population over time relative to the alternative model. San Francisco, for example, has the smallest proportion of children of any large city in the US. Utah, to point to an example Hugo cited, has the youngest population in the Union on average. If a shrinking relative “blue” population, or a shrinking population overall isn’t presumed to be a problem, then I suppose it doesn’t matter. Then again, this year, 2010, we will be reapportioning seats in the House of Representatives, and the first cohort of Baby Boomers will be turning 65, so perhaps that’s a question that might matter.
Great post, Hugo! I’ve been writing about Douthat’s hypocritical and anti-women attitudes for a very long time now. It’s funny to observe how he struggles under the weight of his own glaring contradictions.
To be clear, I don’t agree with Douthat that the rise in single-parent households is lamentable. The reality is more nuanced.
Which one of your parents would you have been better off without?
Yes, there are “nuances”. Many single parents do yeoman work and will be praised in heaven for it. If I raise a crop of orphans to healthy adulthood as a single dad (or mom) then may God shower blessings on me, but the suboptimality of the situation ought to be self-evident.
Tom – Your argument assumes that family models are fairly stable over time, in several respects — that almost all children in `blue model’ families will grow up to become parents in `blue model’ families, that almost no children in `red model’ families will grow up to become parents in `blue model’ families, and that the features of these models won’t dramatically change from generation to generation. But one of the major points made by the likes of Stephanie Coontz is that family models aren’t stable over time. For example, as Russell pointed out in the first comment, they can change, and change quite rapidly, in response to a changing socio-economic context.
The economics of shrinking-and-otherwise-relatively-affluent-and-healthy populations are complex, and the safest best is that there will be both good and bad results if our population ever starts to shrink rather than grow. We should also expect our family models to change in response to these good and bad results; the trick, I’d suggest, is to expect these changes, and make them intelligently and self-consciously.
Robert, the subotimality of life on earth is evident. We live in a world that is, not the world that ought to be. Psychologists may argue that a two-parent household in which both adults are loving and stable and healthy is the ideal, but they also agree that a one-parent household is preferable to one in which there is substantial marital conflict.
I was raised by a single mother following my parent’s divorce when I was six and my brother three. It was the best thing for all of us, and I would not choose to have had it any other way.
As for shrinking populations, that’s increasingly going to be a global phenomenon — Mexico, Brazil, Iran, China (not typical first world countries) have seen their birthrates plummet, in some cases below the natural stability of 2.1 births per woman. They’ll be at European levels soon. Global population will peak in mid-century, and then begin a nearly certain inexorable decline. That’s much bigger than blue state/red state. And it’s sure as hell gonna be better for the environment.
Tom–
Colorado is a good counterexample to the “San Francisco = few children, Utah = lots of children” example; it is a very fast-growing, young state that is politically moderate, and outside of Colorado Springs and the rural areas, is often considered libertarian i.e. socially liberal (although to the extent that many self-described libertarians have become almost indistinguishable from all-around conservatives, I wouldn’t necessarily consider those two terms synonymous.)
The “Democrats don’t have many kids” stereotype is overused to a frightening degree. I once was browsing through radio stations and found a talk radio host (don’t know the name, but didn’t sound like Limbaugh) who said “Liberals hate Sarah Palin because she’s successful and has lots of kids–you don’t see Democrats have lots of kids, especially not disabled ones.”
Those are, to many people, fighting words!! I’d love to hear him say that to the faces of liberals I know who have lots of and/or disabled kids!!
Actually, Nancy Pelosi has the exact same number of kids as Sarah Palin, and I don’t see liberals hating her.
Which one of your parents would you have been better off without?
Well, wait. Why does growing up in single-parent households mean that someone wasn’t there? People get divorced, kids split their time between parents. The parents are still single parents (unless someone remarries, natch), the kids are still raised in single-parent households, but no one is erased from existence.
“I was raised by a single mother following my parent’s divorce when I was six and my brother three. It was the best thing for all of us, and I would not choose to have had it any other way.â€
That’s you. Other people experience different realities which may not have positive outcomes. And if there was substantial marital conflict in the relationship, there usually is substantial residue which cab hold children hostage to their parent’s deficiencies, long after relationships dissolve legally, but NOT emotionally. As you stated, “We live in a world that is, not the world that ought to be.â€
“Well, wait. Why does growing up in single-parent households mean that someone wasn’t there? People get divorced, kids split their time between parents. The parents are still single parents (unless someone remarries, natch), the kids are still raised in single-parent households, but no one is erased from existence.â€
Depends on the parent’s and how well they behave during and after a divorce and who and how often they hook up with people afterward. Many use kids as pawns (controlling parents) and if there was a lot of hostility and animosity in the relationship; children become the victims of their parent’s emotional deficiencies. So even if a parent is physically there, emotionally it can feel as if the needs of the children are non-existent, secondary to the emotional instability of the parent and that can feel a whole lot like erasure.
So even if a parent is physically there, emotionally it can feel as if the needs of the children are non-existent, secondary to the emotional instability of the parent and that can feel a whole lot like erasure.
True in divorce sometimes — and just as often, true in marriages where the couples grimly stay together for the sake of the children.
“Actually, Nancy Pelosi has the exact same number of kids as Sarah Palin, and I don’t see liberals hating her.”
Good point…
To follow the talk radio host’s argument to its logical end, what should we deduce about a family with lots of and/or disabled kids whose parents have opposing politics (which, despite this current age of polarization, do exist?)
Are we to assume that one parent is deadbeat, absentee, or not the biological parent of the children?
True in divorce sometimes — and just as often, true in marriages where the couples grimly stay together for the sake of the children.
Yes, Hugo, exactly. Or even couples who don’t contemplate divorce at all and yet aren’t emotionally available for their kids for other reasons. Marital status of the parents isn’t really correlative with emotional connectivity to the kids.
“Or even couples who don’t contemplate divorce at all and yet aren’t emotionally available for their kids for other reasons. Marital status of the parents isn’t really correlative with emotional connectivity to the kids.”
My point exactly. Emotional connectivity to the kids has to do with the parents and their emotional availability and connectivity to themselves–their emotional intelligence so to speak. Lack of awareness creates a host of problems for everyone.
Nancy Pelosi is also 70. Sarah Palin is 46. There’s a generational difference.
Ultimately, stable family structures or not, someone has to be doing the reproducing. The model doesn’t scale up well without that. We could have constantly shrinking populations, but we haven’t figured out how to make that work from a standpoint of productivity (as in, who keeps the economy running). The unsustainable fiscal situations that are evident throughout the developed world, most notably Greece in recent news, at heart turns on the demographic question: too few young, healthy, productive workers to pay for the unfunded liabilities to older, sicker, retired workers. Either a country grows its population naturally, or it outsources that task and imports new workers through immigration (or from the red states), or we figure out how to keep things running with robots (which the Japanese might be first to do).
There’s always scaling back our lifestyles, but I think robots might happen first.
I find it interesting the way red state types always presume that just because many blue state types are pro-choice that abortion is always part of the equation. I read some of the comments to the New York Times article and saw an interesting comment, that for many liberal parents, they don’t encourage being “libertines.” This person’s red state parents taught similar goals and values that many blue state parents do, the importance of responsibility. Responsibility means being careful of the contexts in which one has sexual relations–the people we have sex with and the scrupulous use of birth control. Contrary to Douthart’s view, what it means then is that although abortion is available, it might rarely be necessary.
I too find it a delicious irony that the red state family values folks are less likely to live by “family values” compared to blue state folks. Their view of family values is so watered down that all it means is that they don’t have abortions. It doesn’t mean stable marriage and stable families. It means unstable marriage and divorce or single parenthood.
“and the scrupulous use of birth control. Contrary to Douthart’s view, what it means then is that although abortion is available, it might rarely be necessary.”
Yeah, but Douthaut believes birth control is one step, if not zero steps, away from abortion. His “chunkier Reese Witherspoon” quote illustrates this (it is his “wise Latina woman” quote, his three words that can be used to define him the way the right defined Sotomayor, except taken in full context it is more damning of him, not less.)
San Francisco is an extremely expensive, cramped city with a dysfunctional school system, located in a huge metropolitan sprawl that allows for all kinds of bedroom communities. If you’re going to make the argument that those selfish blue-staters are fucking themselves into an evolutionary dead end, try harder.
Robert, I would have been better off without one of my parents. Did I just prove that single parenthood rocks?
I am grateful for both my parents, but I have met many people in my day where one of their parents is kind of a DB (and that’s a gender-free assumption, right there), and said friend may have been better off with a more limited contact with that parent, who belittled, shamed, and/or basically sucked at parenting — who knows?!?
Even my parents, great for me, were not always great for my brother, who was not the “easy one.”
who was not the “easy one.â€
That would be me…in our family. To go from Daddy’s Tomboy to Daddy’s Nemesis in the span of early puberty was tough on the household.
And I’m pretty sure Mom was picking me when she laid down the law to Dad.
So I think I get it, Nav. Sometimes the touted “united front” of two-parent families is not necessarily good for all children.
My rural background and life usually precludes comment on this board, because dynamic differ…but this is important:
As any historian of sexual behavior knows, you can never attribute to moral conviction what can be much better explained by lack of access.
Yes. Having served as the child/parent “go-between” on a couple of occasions, and facilitated trips to the Big City of Ann Arbor on a number of others…Mom covertly protecting her daughter…
…access is crucial!
I am always against abortion because it is a sin to kill an innocent child.-,:
Anna,
Abortion is not killing; it’s just not saving life. If you consider abortion killing, do you also consider it “killing” to not donate one’s blood/plasma/organs when the need is there?
Hugo,
You are absolutely wrong. Abortion and contraception have directly attacked the family today. Abortion has especially hurt the black and Hispanic community. In fact abortion was invented with eugenics in mind. Margaret Sanger thought it right to kill off the black community. Take a look at the Racism of Planned Parenthood.
The family is essential for society’s survival!
@Mythago: I live in East Oakland. No part of the Bay Area is a great place to raise kids (actually, I would say that same about California in general).