Is Rising Illegitimacy Necessarily a Problem?

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its irrelevant, some of the countries up there with the higest illegitimacy are also the ones that boast the highest personal freedom and happiness, at least according to the freedom index.

Here is a neat little graph

[img][800:571]http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db18_Fig_6.png[/img]

Huge increases in a lot of countries. Japan doubled to 2 percent, but still very low.

And, an interesting article on the decline of fatherhood:

http://www.utne.com/Politics/Decline-Of ... amily.aspx


While some of us seem to be inclined to blame men (as usual), what about the women? Most men are not acting callously. It could be that a lot of women are leaving 80% of the men in the dust to become a part of the harem of the most attractive 20% of men, thereby raising the illegitimacy rate.

As you can see in all country. A trend towards unmarried parents in all country. It is a sign that we are slowly evolved/adapting to an environment where the dads are no long needed for the survival of the child. We also live in an environment where mothers are not need. The children can go into care with a good chance of surviving to adulthood. Since this is a solid trend amongst all developed countries, I think that it is time to accept that it will be a job of the state to take care of children, and future care home will be needed.

Very good point. Except that European culture tends to favour the government taking care of people, whereas American culture doesn't. So, American women have a huge incentive to be selective about whose ejaculant is entering their vaginas whilst they are ovulating.

‘Sometimes the things that look the hardest have the simplest answers,’ Nina Power writes towards the end of her chapbook, One Dimensional Woman. She then hands over to Toni Morrison speaking to Time magazine in 1989. On single-parent households: ‘Two parents can’t raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community … The little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for white people or for black people. Why we are hanging onto it I don’t know.’ On ‘unwed teenage pregnancies’: ‘Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can … The question is not morality, the question is money. That’s what we’re upset about.’ On how to break the ‘cycle of poverty’, given that ‘you can’t just hand out money’: ‘Why not? Everybody [else] gets everything handed to them … I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network. That’s the shared bounty of class.’

What about education? If all these girls spend their teenage years having babies, they won’t be able to become teachers and brain surgeons, not to mention missing out on cheap beer, storecards, halls of residence. To which Morrison, with splendour, rejoins: ‘They can be teachers. They can be brain surgeons. We have to help them become brain surgeons. That’s my job. I want to take them in my arms and say: “Your baby is beautiful and so are you and, honey, you can do it. And when you want to be a brain surgeon, call me – I will take care of your baby.” That’s the attitude you have to have about human life.’

...

And this, surely, is only the start. It’s obvious – now Power-Morrison has said it – that any politics worth having has to start with the nuclear family: its impossibility, its wastefulness, its historical contingency. Children are the messages a family, a society, a culture, a civilisation, sends into the future, and yet every day there comes more evidence that child-rearing as currently practised among the people with all the choices doesn’t seem to be working out. They overeat, our little messages, they starve themselves, they adore themselves when they’re not indulging in self-harm. They don’t want to study medicine or train as teachers when they can just be ‘in the media’. And this obviousness starts little fires sparking backwards across the decades. There’s Selma James and the strange marginalisation of her ideas, not to mention the way the whole family-in-a-house imago goes unchallenged, even by feminists, lesbian and gay couples, and single-parent campaigners, let alone in government, advertising, the popular media etc.

Very good point. Except that European culture tends to favour the government taking care of people, whereas American culture doesn't. So, American women have a huge incentive to be selective about whose ejaculant is entering their vaginas whilst they are ovulating.

I assume it's my overreaction that there's any hint of misogyny in all this? The women, with their wandering wombs, ensnaring witless men with their feminine wiles.

Well, ok. Glad to hear it.

An, uh, interesting take on it there, though somewhat reductionist for my tastes.

For the last 400 years science has advanced by reductionism ... The idea is that you could understand the world, all of nature, by examining smaller and smaller pieces of it. When assembled, the small pieces would explain the whole.

that is a problem of abuse and there i think we can all agree that there should be a more severe punishment and better tools for persecution.

while definately worrying and sad(sick even) that still doesnt hold true for any and all, or even the majority of illegitimate children.

that is a problem of abuse and there i think we can all agree that there should be a more severe punishment and better tools for persecution.

It's one of those "dirty little secrets" of insular communities. Nobody like to admit to it, but quite often it's an uncle or cousin responsible for the abuse. It's kept quiet because nobody wants to get a family member in trouble with the law, not to mention they've become desensitized to it. When it's gone on for several generations, it's not a big deal (to them).

In a 1974 paper tactfully entitled "The Geography of Stupidity in the U.S.A.," researcher Nathaniel Weyl notes that the three states having the highest white failure rate on the Armed Forces Qualification Test in 1968 were Kentucky (14.8 percent), Tennessee (14.2 percent), and West Virginia (13.4 percent). Weyl attributes the "abnormally large proportion of white mental defectives in the Appalachian region" to, among other things, "the notoriously high rates of inbreeding among the Appalachian population."

How would this be irrelevant? It seems highly relevant. Do high levels of personal freedom and happiness lead to bastardy?