Michael Goodwin
It’s my favorite single-question pop quiz: What is the out-of-wedlock birth rate in The Bronx?
The answers I get from New Yorkers who should know better usually top out at 50 percent. Only occasionally does anyone come close to the correct answer: 70 percent.
You read it right — seven out of 10 babies born in The Bronx in 2010 were born to unmarried parents. The state recorded 22,386 live births in the borough that year, with 15,539 born to single mothers. More than 2,100 of those mothers were teens, some as young as 15.
Yet it is how most people react to hearing the correct answer that I find especially troubling. They are shocked it’s so high, but then shrug and mutter something like, “Well, I’m not surprised.”
That world-weary cynicism illustrates the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s meaning of “defining deviancy down.” His point was that a declining society accepts as normal bad things that are not normal. Numbness leads to inertia.
So it is with out-of-wedlock birth. As the proportion climbed and climbed, from single digits to 41 percent nationally, and 45 percent in the city, our political leaders responded with . . . silence. Even Mayor Bloomberg once said to me that “you know it’s something we can’t touch,” presumably because of the racial implications. Nationally, 73 percent of black children are born to single mothers.
That chat was about six months ago — but I am happy to report that Bloomy’s response could be outdated. City Hall is now getting ready to smash the taboo on confronting out-of-wedlock birth. Heart be still.
The effort is in the planning stage but likely will involve a public-service-style campaign, suggests Robert Doar, Bloomberg’s determined Human Resources commissioner. It will focus on “the outcome of the child,” meaning it will warn potential parents about the hard lives of children if the parents aren’t married.
Doar cites unstable homes, poverty, lower educational achievement and higher odds of criminal behavior as the fate of many children raised without a father. He also has a suggestion for journalists fond of tear-jerker stories about poor, single mothers. Ask them, he urges, “Where’s the father?”
Doar made the comments in a thoughtful speech last week when he won the Manhattan Institute’s Urban Innovator Award for fostering upward mobility instead of dependency among welfare recipients. He outlined Bloomberg’s philosophy that combines conservative principles of “work first” with the liberal instinct for government help, including Medicaid, food stamps and tax credits.
Finally! City to tackle unwed-mom epidemic
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Finally! City to tackle unwed-mom epidemic
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Finally! City to tackle unwed-mom epidemic
