Children have to belong to someone who is responsible for their upbringing. For centuries in the West, they belonged to the father. Thanks to feminist family law, they are now generally assumed to belong to the mother by default. Here’s how well that has worked out:
Welcome to 2011: post-morality and stigma-free. One in eight children under five will never meet the man who donated half their genes. Seventy per cent of young offenders were raised in a lone-parent home. It’s an anguished statistic. “I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection,” said Sigmund Freud. Yet, in some of the poorest parts of the UK, families have been without fathers for three generations. For every feckless Keith, there is an uncertain young dad who would love a chance to be near his children if only their ex-partners would let them. Panorama asked a 20-year-old single mother if she thought her two little boys would miss out by not having a dad around. She could not have been more bemused if they’d offered her a crinoline and a horse-drawn carriage. For young mums like her, fathers are an extinct species. The dadda is deader than the dodo.
The solution is as simple as it is obvious. First, all children must remain in the full legal and financial custody of their genetic fathers regardless of the marital state of the mother and father. Second, no public money will be allotted to the private maintenance of children or their mothers. If private charities and churches wish to provide assistance, they are of course welcome to do so. But either the subsidizing of socially destructive reproductive behavior will end or society itself will collapse. The author’s inevitable recommendation of “education” is as feckless as the reproductive behavior of her poster boy. And if you think the measures I recommend are too harsh, then contemplate the alternative of maintaining the present course.