Unwed Mother Says It's a Bad Bargain

by Maggie Gallagher                                                                                    Vol. VI, No. 6, August 1993

[Maggie Gallagher, a senior fellow at the Center for Social Thought, is author of the book, The Abolition of Marriage. This article is reprinted from the Christian Life commission's journal Light, May-June 1993.]

Like Murphy Brown, I am a journalist and an unwed mother.

After ten years as an unwed mother and six of writing about family issues, I would like to share my personal recipe for single motherhood.

It is too late for Murphy Brown, but, after all, she's only a fictional character who doesn't matter much.

But it may not be too late for the many young professional women I interview who are actively contemplating raising children outside of marriage.

If you're thinking of unwed motherhood, it helps to:

1. Have relatively affluent parents who got and stayed married. That way you can rely on their marriage, rather than your own, to give your child the emotional and financial emergency support system he or she needs.

2. Be able to choose a profession with flexible hours that allows you to take time out and work from home, and be sure to get an Ivy League degree first.

3. (This one is especially tricky.) Find a boss who doesn't mind if you bring a sick 4-year-old and his dinosaurs to the office, which will happen regularly.

4. Accept that, even if you make a good living, you are going to have far less money that anyone you know – except other single mothers.

5. Expect to give up all the advantages of a single life – freedom, romance, travel – and receive none of the advantages of marriage – emotional, logistical, and financial support.

6. Prepare for the nights when your child cries himself to sleep in your arms, wondering why his father doesn't love him. (If your child is allowed to express his real feelings, there will be many such occasions.)

In other words, even if you are lucky enough to find yourself in the most privileged circumstances, unwed motherhood is a bad bargain, whether planned or unplanned.

When Glamour magazine asked its readers to describe "the highs and lows" of being single moms by choice, fully half expressed serious regrets. It is an even worse bargain for the children.

Former Vice President Dan Quayle was right on target when he said that marriage is the best social program ever invented for the protection of children. The evidence on this is now overwhelming. (To cite only one of many statistics that back up this claim, single mothers are six times more likely to be poor than married mothers.)

As impressive as the body of evidence is, it doesn't capture the true costs of the collapse of marriage. Even the many children in single parent households who grow up with all the material accouterments of a middle-class family are being deprived of one very precious and irreplaceable thing: a father.

And, as Murphy would find out if she were a real person and not a Hollywood fantasy, children not only need a father, they long for one, irrationally, with all the undiluted strength of a child's hopeful heart.

To raise one's own child without a father may, at times, be a painful and tragic necessity, but it should never be just another lifestyle option.

Before we can address the real problems single mothers and their children face, we must admit that there is a problem.

We have to stop pretending that all choices are equally good – that single motherhood is just an alternative family form and that fathers are just another new disposable item in the nursery.