According to a new report released by the National Fatherhood Initiative:
While an overwhelming majority of mothers in the survey (or 93 percent) agreed that there is a “father absence crisis” in America today, 55 percent of the mothers said that uninvolved fathers are replaceable by the mother, and 66 percent said that uninvolved fathers are replaceable by other men.
It is a major sociocultural problem when young women believe that fathers are dispensable. But we have, in many ways, created that situation.
Meanwhile, a Planned Parenthood report blames a one-year increase in teen pregnancies on abstinence education. However, pregnancies among young unmarried women in their twenties is a much greater problem.
The North Carolina Family Policy Council maintains that unwed pregnancies, abortions and STD's fell in North Carolina after abstinence education was introduced.
Abstinence education programs have not been funded nearly as heavily as sex education programs. But Robert Rector points out that abstinence education was never given the credit when statistics improved. In addition, he points to the real issues:
The explosive rise in out-of-wedlock births is due not to a lack of contraceptives, but to a crisis in the relationships of young adult men and women in lower income communities. Couples no longer see the need to be married before having children, and they lack the skills to form stable relationships. Ironically, young non-married parents yearn for eventual stable marriages and healthy families, but they utterly lack the skills and understanding to fulfill their aspirations.
Another irony: One of the greatest sins of abstinence-education programs (in the Left’s view) has been their effort to teach low-income youth that it is best to marry before having children. This affront to political correctness has outraged the Left and has been a principal motivator behind the drive to remove abstinence education from the classroom.
Meanwhile, we learn that the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction is teaching the Roe vs. Wade decision as an example of the Supreme Court upholding individual rights against an oppressive government.
We reap what we sow.
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