Abstract

Subject to Debate

The article presents a debate on whether single mothers can bring up children well enough or not. The power of religious lobbies is what keeps sex education, birth control and abortion from the people who need it, and that is one of the reasons America has a much bigger problem with unplanned pregnancies than secularized Western Europe. When Bill Clinton, the U.S. President, says that because of single motherhood "we are raising a whole generation of kids who aren't sure they're the most important person in the world to anybody," he is saying either that single mothers don't love their children or that single mothers are nobodies. In Brooklyn as in Bangladesh, women need more rights-equal pay, day care child support-not more lectures and certainly not more religious interference in their private lives. Some men, after all, are violent, addicted, hostile, unfaithful, emotionally unavailable, unstable, unwilling to spend time or resources on the family.