The original draft of this email was sent to Washington Post reporter Ellen McCarthy. Her front-page story this morning reported on difficult choices some minority women with children are experiencing as they try to reenter the workforce after Covid separations. Most of the women were single mothers, but McCarthy’s story said not a word about their self-dooming choices to bear and raise children out of wedlock. The email was copied to some Post editors and columnists, and to two bleeding-heart “experts” McCarthy quoted.
Dear Ellen,
I admittedly got bored and quit on your latest (and lengthy) woe-is-unmarried-mothers story and thus can’t be sure you didn’t get around to explaining why 7-year-old Antoni’s dad can’t or won’t help care for him [“For women, false choices,” A1, July 6].
But I did read long enough to get to the partial truth you wrote about the post-pandemic workforce-reentry “situation [being] particularly dire for Black and Latina women, who are more likely to work at low-wage and service industry jobs.”
A fuller truth would have added that having babies out of wedlock and raising children without the physical, emotional and financial support of committed, loving husbands and fathers is also something blacks and Latinas are more likely to do. This inarguably contributes significantly to the direness of their situations.
And God bless bleeding-heart Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute, but there’s nothing “false” about the stupidity and irresponsibility of choosing, in post-Roe v. Wade America, to bring innocent and wholly dependent children into the world if one can’t afford child care and other basic necessities.
I suppose the Post keeps telling these sob stories, on the front page no less, because it thinks taxpayers will eventually rise up and demand that government take all of their money so a Super Nanny State can raise all the children of millions of single mothers who should have more wisely postponed parenthood until they were married and otherwise better prepared.
But the actual effect of these stories, from which poor women and their advocates never seem to learn, is to make sensible, more self-reliant people steadily less interested and compassionate. No one gets to keep making one stupid decision after another — like 35-year-old Marie Fofanah’s six kids — without eventually exhausting the public’s store of good will.
So if The Post really wants to help make things better, it should start including in all such reportage a stark, bold-faced moral to the story: Don’t have babies, ladies, unless you have a committed, loving husband and a minimum annual household income of $60,000, indexed for inflation.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.