Family Forum / Parenting / Adoption / November 2006

I was listening to my local NPR outlet this morning (good lefty that I
am).  The topic was the Bush administration's push to get women to
marry before having children.   Apparently, someone believes this will
reduce the number of women and children living in poverty.  The goal
was to get back to 1970 levels of unmarried women with children.

It makes little sense to me, but then I'm not the president. ;-}

I suspect we'd find that a good many of the women who got pregnant and
married in the '70s got divorced in the '80s or later and became
impoverished single mothers.

Live forever?  Not me, thanks.  But you can put me to sleep and wake me
for a week every other decade.

J.

 Sadly labels are here to stay. I suspect it may have something to do with
the seeming fact that most of us have the attention span of a gnat so the
media has to pump specific ideas/suggestions into our heads in the most
concise and compact method possible; ergo, labels. My favorite has been the
use of the term "gunman". If a person commits a crime of violence with a
firearm they are labeled as a "gunman". If any othere type of weapon is
used, the person (and there always seems to be a person involved) is not
forever associated with the object such as "knifeman", "frying pan woman",
"baseball bat person" and etc. I wonder if there is some kind of bias here?

 As for "unwed mother" and "single mom": The normal useage around here for
unwed mom is when a woman gives birth to a child but is not married nor has
been maried. A single mom most often refers to a woman whose husband has
left either through divorce, desertion or death leaving the mother to care
for the children.

My bio mother was divorced at the tme I was born and my bio father was an
unmarried single man. Does that make my bio mom an unwed mom or a single
mom? The former is the case as she had no formal, legal contract of mutual
responsibility (marriage) with the father.

For those of you here in the States: Happy Thanksgiving. If you are the mind
that you have little to be thankful for you might begin with the observation
that you are sitting somewhere looking at a computer screen reading this..

Raymond