Morality & Motherhood

In the nation’s increasingly heated discussion of values, is there a difference between Alice McKinney and Ra-Shonda Anderson?

Eighty miles of rolling farmland separate 40-year-old McKinney, a medical illustrator in Rochester, Minn., from Anderson, a 17-year-old high schooler in a working-class neighborhood of East St. Paul. McKinney has a secure white-collar career. Anderson just lost her part-time job. McKinney is white. Anderson is black.

But the two women, in most ways worlds apart, share a private decision: Each is unmarried, and each has decided to have a baby.

As unwed motherhood has become a more scrutinized part of the nation’s family portrait, Americans have seemed willing to draw a distinction between women like McKinney and Anderson--a distinction based as much on economic, social and practical considerations as on bedrock morality. But today, a resurgent values debate has begun to cast equal doubt on both women’s child-bearing decisions--a reflection, some say, of a broader sense of disquiet over the nation’s moral health.

There is little evidence that Americans are returning to the days when unmarried pregnant women fled their communities in shame. But winds of change appear to be blowing, and from more than one direction.

Within the social science community, an increasingly vocal group of researchers argue that the problems associated with single parenthood tend to hold true at all levels of the socioeconomic ladder, even if they are more pronounced along the bottom rungs. They cite studies that have found significant differences--statistically, at least--between children raised in fatherless homes and those raised with both parents present.

Developmental psychologists have begun to plumb the depths of a father’s importance in a child’s emotional growth. Many have concluded that single motherhood--a phenomenon that through divorce, choice and widowhood affects almost half of all kids at some point in their childhood--is bad for society and, on balance, bad for the children touched by it.

“The daughter of the black teenage mother in the inner city and the [child] of Murphy Brown are almost identical,” declares David Blankenhorn, author of “Fatherless America” (Basic Books, 1995) and director of the Institute of American Values in New York. “What unites them is more important than the things that separate them.”

Within the public policy arena, growing numbers of politicians--President Clinton among them--are asserting that having babies out of wedlock is fundamentally wrong, no matter what the mother’s circumstances.

“I don’t think anyone in public life today ought to condone children born out of wedlock,” Donna Shalala, Clinton’s secretary of Health and Human Services, told a congressional committee, “even if the family is financially able.”

Such pronouncements create real pain for women like McKinney and Anderson, both of whom have given the matter serious thought and have decided that having a child is the right choice. Both acknowledge that single parenthood poses bigger challenges than traditional mom-and-dad arrangements. Both agree that to some extent they are defying the odds, at least as calculated by sociologists. Both concede that what is right for them as individuals may not represent the best choice when spread across all of society.

“I’m not promoting that everyone should do this,” McKinney says.

To Love and Be Loved

For both McKinney and Anderson, a baby would satisfy much the same urge: To be the whole world to a child. To love and be loved without condition. To see one’s own biological inheritance grow and gain independence.

But they have taken very different routes to their decision.

For McKinney, the tick-tick-tick of her biological clock has set off a deafening alarm. After years of graduate school, travel and a single life on the go, she has settled into the kind of stability she thinks is right for bringing up a child.

A husband--and a father for her child--would be nice, she says. But neither is in the picture, nor even on the horizon. And neither, she has concluded, is indispensable.

McKinney exudes a sense of down-to-earth solidity. But inside this diffident woman, who sings with her church choir, is an individualist who quietly but firmly demands her rights in this society.

McKinney has pored over catalogs that list the physical characteristics and recreational interests of anonymous sperm donors. She has picked one who has roughly the same physical characteristics as she does--increasing, she hopes, the likelihood that the resulting child would look like her. The rest is a matter of biology.

Anderson, a shy teenager who has struggled through high school, has all the time in the world to have a child. But she sees little reason to wait.

Last year, Anderson got pregnant at 16. She wanted to have the baby. But her parents argued she was too young and Anderson, thinking about “all the things I had to do,” decided to have an abortion.

She regrets ending that pregnancy and has been thinking ever since about trying again. She is about to move in with her 17-year-old boyfriend, Randy, who is all for having a baby.

This time, she says, “I’m OK with that.” While not pregnant, Anderson expects it could happen any day now. And she’s doing nothing to prevent it.

Anderson says she might marry Randy “because I think I love him.” But marriage and kids, she adds, are “independent decisions.” Guys, she says, “are a lot different nowadays: Most of them cheat. . . . Some of them are good dads, some aren’t. Some of them don’t come around at all” once a baby is born.

Anderson is one of the only kids she knows who lives with both of her married parents. Randy, too, has married parents and has stuck with Anderson through a lot, including the abortion. “I’m not trying to trap him or nothing,” she says. “I’m more worried about him being there for my child than I am for him being there for me.”

A National Debate

Against the backdrop of rising juvenile crime, falling educational performance and profound changes in the American family, the steep rise in out-of-wedlock births is fueling a national debate that only 10 years ago would have been too hot to handle.

Today, 31% of babies in the United States are born to unmarried mothers, up from 11% in 1970. Among African Americans, two-thirds are born to a single mother. And in recent years, out-of-wedlock births to older, professional white women have grown faster in percentage terms than they have among any other group.

Many politicians and commentators now refer without apology to the rise in “illegitimate” births, a term that fell out of favor during the 1970s and ‘80s. Using the sweeping welfare reform legislation passed recently as a vehicle for discussion, lawmakers in recent months have engaged in an extraordinary exchange over the causes and consequences of out-of-wedlock births.

The American public appears deeply divided. In a Times Poll conducted in April, 50% of those surveyed answered flatly that it is always or almost always wrong for a woman--any woman--to have a baby out-of-wedlock; 44% pronounced such a decision not wrong, or only sometimes wrong.

While the political debate focuses on the childbearing decisions of the young, poor and unmarried, social scientists have been exploring a much broader population of single mothers and their children. Their findings, some of which belie conventional wisdom, should give pause both to Anderson and McKinney, as well as to the 1.2 million other unmarried women who will give birth this year.

McKinney’s higher income clearly bodes better for her offspring, these researchers note. Even so, the best available statistics suggest that only about half of the disadvantages a child suffers in a single-parent family can be linked to the effects of poverty. The other half, it seems, afflict the affluent as well as the poor.

An increasing number of family and child-welfare experts would argue that both McKinney and Anderson are exposing their children to significantly heightened risks of dropping out of school, engaging in criminal behavior and, in the case of girls, becoming pregnant as teenagers.

According to Sara S. McLanahan, a Princeton University sociologist who has conducted the most comprehensive study of single mothers and their children, such kids are twice as likely to drop out of high school as are the children of married parents where both mother and father are present in the home. Girls raised by single mothers are 2 1/2 times as likely to become teen mothers. Boys in single-parent families are twice as likely to be idle--neither in school nor working--in early adulthood.

McLanahan has borne the ire of women like Jane Mattes, the New York-based founder of Single Mothers by Choice--a support group made up of women who have made a conscious decision to have and rear children alone. Mattes has demanded that McLanahan distinguish between single mothers like herself--whose children, she insists, fare well--from the children of other single mothers.

McLanahan acknowledges that women like McKinney--older, affluent, better-educated bread-winners who have made a conscious choice to have children alone--represent a sliver of the single-parent spectrum and have not yet been the object of separate study. But she stands by her conclusions that all children born into fatherless homes face substantially greater risks than do children raised by both parents.

“It’s not that there aren’t single mothers who aren’t doing more than two parents,” McLanahan says. “But we’re talking about statistics, about averages. And on average, it’s a much harder thing to do, and it’s more unusual to find someone who can do all that.”

The Economic Factor

McKinney’s decision to bear a child would undoubtedly score higher approval ratings than Anderson’s.

McKinney owns a three-bedroom home in Rochester with a fenced-in backyard and earns an income almost twice as high as the nation’s median family income.

Anderson recently lost her job as a part-time counselor at the East St. Paul Boys and Girls Club after taking an unscheduled vacation--a lapse her supervisor says has happened before. Even when she worked, Anderson didn’t bring home much money. Now she has no job at all, and not much likelihood of getting one. Anderson admits that if her boyfriend doesn’t stay around, she will be hard-pressed to make ends meet.

Her parents probably would help. But while Anderson says she “would rather try and do it on my own,” she concedes that welfare is an option she might have to seek.

Financial wherewithal clearly plays a powerful role in the public’s judgments about a single woman’s decision to have a child. Polls show that much of the public’s discomfort with out-of-wedlock births is driven by perceptions that mother and child will become dependent on the state.

A 1995 poll conducted for Newsweek found that 52% of Americans do not believe it is morally wrong for a woman to conceive a child out of wedlock if the potential mother is not a teenager and is able to support a baby financially; 41% contended that such a decision is morally wrong.

But 74% said it is morally wrong for a teenager who is unable to support a child financially to conceive outside of marriage. Only 21% said such a decision is morally defensible.

Such distinctions are not unfounded, as demographer Nicholas Zill recently told Congress. Almost half of all single-parent, female-headed families live in poverty today--a rate nearly six times higher than the poverty rate among married-couple families with children.

Rights Vs. Morality

The superheated debate over welfare reform has intertwined issues of morality with issues of public policy. And in the view of some observers, the two are fundamentally different.

If you believe that children are best raised by two present parents, then you must conclude that any woman, rich or poor, old or young, is wrong to have a child on her own, says professor Stephen Carter, who teaches law and ethics at Yale law school. And if you believe that marriage is a sacred institution that is the bedrock of a spiritual community, then you must conclude the same.

“Saying, ‘I have a right to do this,’ is a complete legal defense, but it’s irrelevant as a moral defense,” Carter says. “One has to discuss morality apart from the discussion of rights. The fact I have a right to do something doesn’t change your right to criticize me for doing it.”

Such views are frequently espoused from church pulpits. But the nation’s mainstream religious establishments, like its political leaders, do not speak with one voice on the issue of out-of-wedlock births.

In The Times Poll, Catholics were only slightly more likely than other respondents to state that out-of-wedlock births are always or almost always wrong; non-Catholic Christians were just as ambivalent as the larger population of respondents. Only those identifying themselves as white Christian fundamentalists showed a marked disapproval for out-of-wedlock births, with 68% considering such decisions always or almost always wrong.

“I don’t think you can just give a blanket endorsement that whatever a woman wants to do is fine with the church,” says Nancy Victorin-Vangerud, McKinney’s minister at the Christ United Methodist Church. But, she adds, “some women feel a very spiritual calling to become mothers,” and if a woman has considered deeply the responsibilities--”the covenant”--she has with the community and with her child, “there is the possibility of spiritual and moral integrity in that decision.”

Many clergy wish that the larger society would do the hard work of discouraging out-of-wedlock births, leaving it to churchmen and women to provide compassion and spiritual assistance when unmarried women get pregnant, whether by choice or mistake.

“What you’d like to do ideally is to make a society in which people see this as a wrong choice,” says Barry Freudel, rabbi of the Georgetown Synagogue in Washington, D.C., and a member of the interfaith summit on fatherhood.

University of Maryland professor William Galston, a leading figure in the burgeoning “communitarian” movement and an advisor to President Clinton, notes that Americans are struggling to look beyond their own rights and interests and consider the broader social consequences of the personal decisions they make.

Galston acknowledges that McKinney’s advantages in age, income and education may give her child a better chance of beating the odds than Anderson’s child, if both children end up living their lives without a father present. For the same reason, McKinney’s child may be less costly to taxpayers than Anderson’s.

But in values terms, McKinney’s decision to have a child may be equally costly to society, because neither woman’s choices can be seen as independent of one another, Galston asserts.

“You cannot have a society--particularly a democratic society--that advocates that behavior that is acceptable for the privileged classes is not OK for the middle classes,” Galston says. “It doesn’t work that way. You have to assume that whatever is done by those who are privileged will have important trickle-down effects.”

Beating the Odds

McKinney has thought about all this. She acknowledges she has had passionate internal debates, asking whether her decision to have a child on her own is selfish.

Yes, she concedes, the statistics might show increased risks for her offspring over those of married parents. But, “I think I bring more to the system” than does a poorer, teenage mom, she says. And she feels she can overcome the challenges of single motherhood.

In the end, she concludes, it is not merely an act of selfishness--no more than any person’s desire to have a baby is. She has thought about what her child will likely contribute to the larger society, as well as to her personal happiness, and she sees a net gain to all.

“I have the ability to nurture a child into adulthood that would be a benefit to society, not a hindrance,” McKinney says. “I feel fairly confident about beating those odds.”

Anderson, too, hopes to beat the odds. Part of the attraction of having a child, she says, is “watching something of mine grow up--something that I made--and trying to do the things for my kids that my mom and dad do for me.”

Anderson acknowledges that McKinney’s child might fare better than her own: “Someone that has a house and nice-paying job, it’d probably be a lot easier for them.”

Easier, perhaps, but who can really say better?