0:05 - Introduction to the Pregnancy Problem
2:32 - The Societal Impact of Unwed Mothers
8:57 - Historical Approaches to Pregnancy Issues
15:44 - The Role of Family in Managing Pregnancy
19:49 - The Economic Consequences of Single Motherhood
24:19 - Conclusion and Call to Action
In this episode, I delve into the complex issue of unwed motherhood and the societal ramifications it entails. This topic is undeniably multifaceted, leading us to explore not only the immediate challenges faced by unwed mothers but also the broader implications for society as a whole. As I take a stroll before my morning show, I reflect on the historical context of how societies have traditionally dealt with unplanned pregnancies, particularly among young women.
Historically, unwed mothers often faced immense pressure to 'hide' their pregnancies, either through shot-gun marriages, sending them away to give birth in secret, or orchestrating adoptions under the guise of familial ties. Such methods, though problematic, were societal attempts to manage a challenging situation. However, as we recognize, these strategies are inadequate in addressing the systemic issues posed by the increasing number of single mothers today.
The crux of the issue hinges on the fact that the consequences of unplanned pregnancies extend far beyond the individuals involved. The reality is that when a woman has a child without a provider, it is not just her burden to bear—it becomes a collective societal challenge. As we discuss, children raised in unstable environments often face difficulties that manifest in various negative ways throughout their lives, subsequently affecting the society at large. I unpack this idea, illustrating the long-term impact of neglected childhoods and the ripple effect they have on community safety, social welfare, and economic stability.
Throughout the conversation, I highlight the nuances of the responsibilities shared by both men and women in these scenarios. While acknowledging that men also play a critical role in these situations, I emphasize that the nature of pregnancy creates a unique set of consequences that women must navigate, often with fewer resources and support. This leads to the understanding that society, at large, cannot remain indifferent. The strain brought on by single motherhood can lead to escalating issues that ultimately affect all members of the community, particularly if left unchecked.
I also explore the repercussions of welfare systems that can inadvertently reinforce cycles of dependency rather than foster independence or accountability. We analyze how these systems can distort the understanding of family and responsibility, turning children into assets rather than recognizing them as the financial and emotional liabilities they can often become if not nurtured appropriately.
In conclusion, I outline a vision for how society can effectively address the growing prevalence of unwed motherhood. By fostering a culture that promotes earlier marriage, supportive family structures, and responsible sexual education, we could potentially mitigate many of the adverse effects associated with single motherhood. Ultimately, society must confront the fact that it cannot ignore the challenges posed by unwed mothers—it is imperative for all of us to acknowledge our shared responsibility in forging a path toward better outcomes for future generations.
[0:00] Good morning, everybody. I hope you're doing well. This is Stefan Molyneux, freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
[0:06] And just having a little stroll before the morning show at 11 a.m. And I wanted to talk about, you know, sort of the problem of a pregnancy. And it's a huge, it's a huge problem. It's a huge, huge problem. And a lot of politics is kind of centered or focused on attempting to deal with this problem of unwed mothers. Unwed mothers. It's a very, very big, deep, and meaty problem. So we can say, well, women who make mistakes should bear the brunt of those mistakes, and so on, but they kind of can't. I mean, they practically actually really can't they had the branch of those mistakes. And what I mean by that is, if a woman gets pregnant.
[1:01] And the man doesn't stick around, it's everybody's problem. It's everybody's problem. So that sort of foundational issue, it's not like if a woman gets pregnant out of wedlock, you know, she's sent to go and live in the woods, right? You're not sent to go and live in the woods and raise her child on her own, and they just kind of live their lives out in the wilderness us and so on, right? I mean, as you know, humans are a grow and release species, right? If somebody, you know, beats their dog, that's terrible, horrible, of course, if they beat their dog. But usually a beaten dog stays in property and doesn't get out to, you know, bite and harm others, right? But given that these dogs grow up, get big, and go out into the world, so to speak, The children who are raised in bad circumstances, they get up out of their initial environment, they go out into the world, and the world has to deal with them for like 85 years. Well, I mean, you could say 65 years after they become adults, 67 years, 18 to 85. So society, and this is the amazing power that women have. And this is why society is so helpless in the face of women's bad decisions, because it's not fundamentally the women who suffer in the long term.
[2:26] Over bad child raising. It is, of course, society as a whole that suffers.
[2:33] It's other people who suffer when kids are lazy or violent or unmotivated or neglectful or abusive or go out and father their own. Like, a teenage girl gets pregnant out of wedlock, and what is society supposed to do? What is society supposed to do? Now, if it's a small number of women who get pregnant out of wedlock, that's one thing, if it's a small number.
[3:01] However, when that number swells, society is hosed. Now, of course, the traditional way that, I'm just going to say teen pregnancy, I mean, I'm generally talking about out of wedlock pregnancy as a whole, But the way that it used to work in the past was, sorry, used to work in the past, a bit redundant. Let me lengthen it by pointing out how redundant it is. Oh, that's redundant too. Anyway, so what used to happen, of course, was the women, the girls, the teenagers, would be taken in by their parents. Well, they would try to track down the boy and shotgun marriage, right? Make him, make you marry her. If that fails, right, if you manage to escape, then what would happen? Well, I suppose certain abortion techniques would be tried.
[3:50] And if those failed, then the woman would move in with her parents, right? And the parents, they would sort of hide the young woman and in richer families, she'd be sent away to Switzerland or France or something. And she'd give the, she would have the baby, and then the baby would be passed off as her mother's, right? So the grandmother would pretend to be the mother, and that she'd had an oops-late-in-stage, late-in-life baby, and would often raise this baby with no knowledge of the actual origin story. I suppose the husband would know, because the baby occurred without pregnancy, but they would just have to hide it all, and then it would be raised that way.
[4:35] And that was one the other of course would you give the child up for adoption or something like that or someone else in the family might pretend that the baby was theirs and raised the baby that way and and that was sort of how it was it was dealt with now this is not great i know occasionally i sort of think about starting over right.
[4:57] And not because I have any plans to start over, but just because I'm, you know, curious, like to sort of put myself in other sort of thoughts and mindsets. So I think about, you know, there's a sort of typical story of a guy who, he's married, he raises a kid. So he raises a couple of kids with his wife. He gets divorced or his wife dies or something like that. And then he meets a new woman who's younger and she wants to have kids. And there's sort of a conflict, right? And the conflict is, that the guy is like, nah, that feels like starting over. I just, I don't want to start over. I don't want to start over. I don't want to start it all over again. And I sort of think about that with myself. My daughter is going to be 17 this year. And so she's, you know, getting ready to launch, right? And so I just imagine if there was some circumstance under which 58, you know, obviously a bit old, right? But that I would start with a new family or raise new kids. And it's like, oh man, not only am I kind of old, but just the idea of starting all over again is pretty wild. So I think most people in general, when they get into their 50s, they don't particularly want to start over. But of course, most people would be doing it if they had their kids at 18 and then their kid got pregnant at, say, 16. Well, that's a whole different.
[6:18] Situation, right? You're much younger, you can pass off a pregnancy as your own and you have more energy, some youth and all of that. So that's sort of how it used to work. You would try for an abortion. I guess I'm justifying it, I'm just saying what would work, right? You try for an abortion or the grandparents who pass the children off, the baby off as their own and try to get the girl back into the dating market and or the child will be put up for adoption or something like that, right? So that's how it used to work and given how ridiculously inconvenient that was and also kind of shameful because it was kind of a known strategy so if you say oh my my wife had a surprise pregnancy while we were on vacation for you know five months or four months or you know from show to baby right so this would be such a fairly obvious ruse but it would be kind of like the obvious ruse like people would just kind of go along with it. They'd know, but nobody would challenge it, right?
[7:21] Nobody would challenge it. You know, it's kind of like when your kid makes a drawing, obviously objectively it's not very good compared to like a real artist, but you just kind of go along with it. And so when you tell a lie like that, everybody knows it's kind of a lie, but you know, they just kind of go along with it because that's the kind of lubrication that society needs sometimes, or at least feels it needs. And so society as a whole cannot be indifferent to pregnancy without a provider. It's an adult wedlock pregnancy. It's a pregnancy without a provider. Because the woman, the girl, cannot provide for herself while raising a baby.
[8:01] And, of course, it was well understood in society that, particularly boys, that's harmful for girls too, but particularly for boys, to be raised without a father created problems. And this is all the way back to Edmund and Edgar in King Lear. Again, this is not proof, but it's an example of what sort of society thought. Bastards were a problem, right? Edgar is the nice one, Edmund is the not nice one, Edmund is the bastard, and so on, right? I think I've got those right. It's been a while since I was in the play. And so society cannot much survive a plethora of single mothers. It's one of these, like, a small amount can be dealt with, with sort of social falsehoods and things like that. A small amount can be dealt with. A small amount of single mothers can be dealt with. A significant number of single mothers cannot be dealt with.
[8:57] And so, it's one of these things that as single motherhood begins to grow, society kind of panics and votes in a welfare state. And then, because of the welfare state, as single motherhood explodes.
[9:13] It. And once that happens, it becomes systemic, it becomes endemic, it becomes multi-generational, and there's no good answers. Like, there are no good answers left at that point. I mean, obviously, freedom is a good answer, and single mothers would be much better off if they all sort of pooled together their resources, rented houses together, watched each other's Children, mother, each other work, they'd have a community, and it would be better as a whole. But they would, of course, fight and resist that like crazy. And the problem is, of course, as I sort of talked about before, that I think a lot of leftist agitators are just the sons of single mothers sent out to ensure that the government cheese keeps rolling into the nest.
[10:01] But this vulnerability of pregnancy without a provider, society has to do something. Society has to do something. And what society does, of course, what society should do is it should prevent these situations or circumstances from coming into being in the first place. But once that Rubicon has been crossed and we have, you know, ridiculous numbers of single mothers now, you know, fatherless households are, you know, 50% in the white community, almost three-quarters in the black community. And, I mean, it's a catastrophe, right? And this is why, because women have this, it's not the power directly, it's the power of consequences. I mean, if a blind guy starts firing off a machine gun in a mall, he's not aiming to hit anyone because he can't see them, but there's huge negative consequences to his actions. So he's not trying to shoot anyone, but people are going to get shot. So, single mothers, they're not trying to harm society, but society is going to get harmed.
[11:10] So the vulnerability that society has to women's bad decisions. Now, of course, I understand it takes two to tango. And of course, the man is involved as well. But the man can flee. The woman can't. A man can flee a pregnancy. A woman can't outrun a fetus, right? It's going with her wherever she's going. So this is not to say that men are not responsible. 50-50. I get all of that. But this is why women traditionally were the gatekeepers of sex, because they had many more negative consequences than men. And as a result of that, society as a whole. So society cannot be indifferent to unwed mothers, to a pregnancy without a provider. It is not something that whose problems are contained within the family, right? Like there are indirect effects. I sort of take some guy who drinks, he lives out in a cabin in the middle of where he drinks himself half-blind every night, and he's, you know, obviously a rampant alcoholic and so on, but he's out there in the woods on his own. He's not out drunk driving. He's not starting bar fights. He's just kind of wrecking his liver out among the pines on his own.
[12:19] Now, there's an indirect effect in society in that, and let's assume he makes his own moonshine, so he's not even fueling the alcohol industry. So, the only effects that he really has is indirect, in that he's not participating in society, but he's not directly harming society. I mean, it's the removal of a positive, not the infliction of a negative. And, you know, in some ridiculous imaginary scenario, if all unwed pregnant women went, voluntarily to some island in the middle of nowhere and kept their kids there, then society would have less of a direct reason to interfere. I mean, for reasons of sort of general morality and so on, but not sort of specific negative consequences.
[13:09] So the fact that the unwed mothers have children within society and those fatherless children are going to cause disproportionate amounts of chaos and violence and abuse and addiction and, you know, all kinds of bad stuff, society has a vested interest in trying to figure out how to manage this system. Now, of course, the way to manage the system is through morality. Through the non-initiation of force, right? If we look at this, how a free society would handle this kind of issue, then yeah, it would handle this issue by irrespectful property rights and personhood. So, since the family would bear the brunt of the unwed mother's pregnancy and child birth, then the family would have a very strong vested interest in regulating or managing the sexual behavior of the teenagers.
[14:09] And therefore, there would be a strong sexual education about these things in schools or however the children were educated. And there would be chaperones, there would be social shaming, there would be lots of, you know, obviously peaceful control mechanisms to manage these things. And an encouragement of early marriage. I mean, of course, one of the things is that, I mean, young people are told to finish high school and then go to university and then start their careers before they get married, right? So, we're talking sort of mid to late 20s, which is, you know, more than a decade after sexual maturity and to expect them to not have any sex from the age of 18 to 25 or 27 is a bit idealistic, to put it mildly. So, yeah, encouragement of early marriage so that the pregnancy would come with the provider and a lack of ability to access more responsible people's money if you got pregnant.
[15:08] And therefore, the costs and shame would accrue to the family. And I mean, it would be kind of hard to hide a pregnancy in the age of social media if you were posting. So it would be even more obvious than it would be in the past. So the costs would accrue to the family. And because the cars accrue to the family, the parents, they have a vested interest in making sure that their kids get hitched before getting pregnant. Get pregnant at marriage, right? No bedding before the wedding, at least. Not procreative sex.
[15:40] That's sort of how it would be handled. That's how it would be handled in the past.
[15:44] Of course, people would still make mistakes and they would still be irresponsible and so on. And there would still be consequences, negative consequences that would accrue. And the problem is, of course, and this is just economics, right? The seen versus the unseen. The problem is that the negative consequences that accrue to women who are pregnant or girls who are pregnant outside of wedlock, if they don't have a family, the family just kicks them out. They wander the streets pregnant, and, you know, no man's going to want to marry them because they're pregnant with another man's child and whatever reason, right? I mean, these days, of course, a lot easier to find and track down the father and make him responsible, right? That would be the other issue too, right? So, the parents would take something on. Of course, in the past, you could just move to some other town and, you know, it's a whole lot easier to escape the responsibility. Now, it's pretty hard to despawn, right? It's pretty hard to vanish. So you would be tracked down and you would have to pay for the baby. And because you'd have to pay for the baby, you'd be more responsible in your sexuality, right? You wouldn't. The fact that men can a lot of times escape these responsibilities now or legally, maybe they can't, but because of the welfare state, there's less incentive to pursue them. But then you would have everybody with a vested interest in controlling procreative sex to the point where.
[17:08] Carry before you marry, right? It always has to ride for some reason. So you have the parents with a vested interest. They're controlling their offspring's sexuality. You have the young women who face negative consequences for getting pregnant and their side of wedlock. You have the young men who are going to face negative consequences for the same. And everybody's kind of working in concert to try and minimize these issues. Will these issues be minimized? Yeah. Will they be eliminated? No. Free will, right? People make bad decisions. So, of course, the problem is it's the seen versus the unseen and the immediate versus the distant right so if a woman falls through the cracks so to speak and and gets pregnant and there's no family no guy that could be found or whatever it is like any number of things and this can happen to widows too if particularly if the her husband doesn't have health insurance and he dies sorry life insurance and he dies, then she's kind of out of luck as far as that goes, right? But what happens is the suffering of that woman in the moment, oh, who's going to feed my kids? How am I going to survive? The suffering of that woman in the moment moves everyone's hearts. And they don't see, of course, that in 15 plus years, her little kids might be terrorizing the neighborhood.
[18:26] And so the immediate suffering is clear. The woman needs money. She wants government money. She wants resources and so on. And then what they don't see is two things. One is the harm that this is going to do down the road. Because if she gets government money, she's going to keep her kids and raise them as a single mother. If she doesn't get government money and there's no other support systems, she's going to most likely give the kids up to adoption. And they're going to be, you know, in a free society at least. Of course, they would be raised by a mentally healthy two-parent household. So they would do much better, right?
[19:02] So that is a big problem. People see the seen versus the unseen, the suffering of the woman in the moment, and not two things. One is the suffering, of course, of society down the road if she keeps her kids, most likely, or at least reasonably likely. And the second, of course, is if she gets a bunch of government money because she's a single mom, people don't see all of the other bad decisions that are made because of that money. As I've mentioned before in the show, turning children from a liability into an asset has fundamentally reshaped all of society in exactly the wrong direction. Children are not an asset. You shouldn't be able to make money by having children. Children are a cost. Financially, they're a liability. Wonderful things and wonderful creatures, but financial liability, which means someone's got to pay for it.
[19:49] But if you force people to pay for it through the state, then children are turned from a liability, which requires a provider, into an asset, which promotes the unhealthy having of extra children for the sake of income.
[20:03] So it is very tragic what is going on. And because statist systems cannot reform themselves, because statist systems cannot reform themselves, things just get kind of worse and worse. There is no arresting these issues. I mean, I remember after losing ground, Charles Murray's book came out, Bill Clinton and the Democrats tried to reform welfare. And, you know, there were some moves in the right direction, but when the principle of coercive redistribution is unmolested, so to speak, it just shapes itself into various configurations with the basic principle remaining intact, which is violations of the non-aggression principle and property rights. So, I think if we sort of understand that women have such an unbelievable amount of power over society in that if they get pregnant out of wedlock, if they get pregnant without a provider.
[20:59] Then in a sense they kind of hold society hostage. They kind of hold society hostage because they hold a beautiful baby of course, not the baby's fault, but they also hold statistically somewhat of a ticking time bomb that goes off for the next 60 years in society. I mean the amount of dysfunction that badly raised children can wreak upon society and of course they can be badly raised in a two-parent household, they get all of that, but we're just talking the general statistics of what's most likely, but the mayhem that badly raised children can wreak in society is, I mean, it's practically infinite because it really can't be measured in any detailed way, because there's no control group, right? Some rampaging son of a single mother can't be compared with if he'd been raised in a two-parent household and you can't measure the difference and you just, it's practically infinite because we know it's more, but it can't ever be measured directly. So, that power, the power that women have in their absolute demand for resources, if they're pregnant without a provider, that power, or the effect that that has on society, means that society has to do something. You just can't let these women live in the gutter, right? Well, as a kid, that's even worse, right? So, society has to do something.
[22:16] If you combine that power, that a pregnant woman without a provider is kind of holding society hostage. And I'm just talking, I'm not talking about the morals, I'm talking about the rational and resource-based analysis of the situation. So, given that pregnancy without provision holds society hostage, women need resources, otherwise it's even worse for society when their kids, as their kids grow and their kids grow up. And of course, it's not just when they grow up, right? Because, you know, the badly raised kids, I was just talking to someone in the ex-spaces the other day about this. So he's a bully. He was a badly raised kid, became a violent bully. So it can happen in kidhood as well. So you combine the power of pregnancy without a provider with the power of political voting, and you have a power block that men cannot reason with, cannot surmount, cannot overcome. Because deep down, of course, because men can't get pregnant, at least, you know, as of until quite recently, men cannot get pregnant.
[23:20] And they just don't have that same leverage over society. Now, of course, we should shame the rakes and we should shame the fornicators and we should shame the men who have unprotected sex with women, get them pregnant and then leave. We should absolutely shame and harm those men in terms of not harm them physically but you know should take resources from them to provide for the children that they have made but it's still not the same it's just not a visceral it's not as direct so the power of pregnancy without provision plus the power of political voting creates a an authority that men cannot surmount now we can say oh well women are just mean this way and it's like yeah but women have lusts and women make mistakes but it is that that power of pregnancy without that provision and the hostage that this holds in a sense because of the negative effects in general in society in the future, that's just a fact. And it can't be wished away. It can't be waved away. It just has to be looked at, I think, and confronted head on.
[24:19] So I hope that helps. freedomain.com slash donate. Thank you for your support. I'll go get ready for my show and talk to you lovely donors at 11 a.m. And if you'd like to join for the donor shows, you can go to fdrurl.com slash locals sign up for free take it for a spin see what you like and i'll talk to you then bye.
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