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Notes -
The abortion debate below brought to mind something I've been thinking about for a while. There's been a convergence of sorts between mainstream Republicans/conservatives and the far-right, but there are still many differences, such as on the Single Mother Question. The far-right (which includes most people on this website) views single mothers negatively, while the mainstream conservative view is very different. For instance, here's what Speaker Mike Johnson said about Medicaid:
Mainstream conservatives and the far-right agree that the welfare state serves to subsidize single motherhood, but only the latter thinks it's a bad thing. Mainstream conservatives' embrace of single motherhood is connected with abortion politics. One mainstream conservative pundit put it succinctly: "you can't be pro-life and anti-single mom." Many on the far-right responded to her tweet with "just watch me" and others scratched their heads, wondering what she meant. But there's a certain logic to it. Much of the motivation for abortion comes from women not wanting to be single mothers. You can respond to this in two ways:
The far-right prefers option 1, I've heard it many times on this website. But do you think it will actually be effective in changing behavior? I personally suspect that given the options of not having sex or having sex at the risk you might have to drive out of state and get an abortion and then get shamed by some online anonymous far-rightists, the latter will be the popular option. Just a vague suspicion I have. So it doesn't surprise me that many conservatives choose option 2. It also harmonizes better with the current conservative political coalition, which is increasingly reliant on the votes of low-class and non-white voters who have higher rates of single-motherhood. We wouldn't want to be elitist, looking down our noses at the salt-of-the-earth working class now would we?
I don't think this gets at the mainstream conservative position, or least the more religious inflected one. I would say most religious conservatives I know, at least, would say 1) single women absolutely shouldn't be having premarital sex, and 2) no one should be killing unborn babies, and so once a young woman is pregnant while single, the locus of moral concern and protection is on the blameless unborn child... and if helping and encouraging the single mother out (who often are vulnerable women themselves, even if they've made terrible choices) helps the baby, then so be it.
Same with Medicaid for the kids of single moms; to most religious conservatives, anyway, the kids didn't do anything wrong, even if their parents did.
I think this is a different position from a lot of progressives, who might well want to destigmatize sexual liberation and single motherhood and leave it as one coequal choice that women might make, who might think that the stigmatization is responsible for a lot of the difficulty of the position in the first place, and who think government really has an obligation to make the coequal choices more available to women if they choose them. And it's a different position, too, from a lot of more libertarian / non-religious conservatives, who might well see single mothers AND their children as primarily a context where incentives matter - if you make it too easy to be the child of a single mom, the system will produce more of them. And besides, a lot of those behaviors are downstream from HBD anyway, and in those cases, the kids are probably tainted by a kind of biological original sin anyway, given the evidence of their parents.
That's my sense, anyway; for the religious conservatives I know (and I think they are typical of a lot of conservatives), a lot of the issues around single parenthood amount to something like a kind of triage, trying to figure out how not to hurt the morally blameless while maintaining high standards and ideals and valuable stigma that keep bad behavior in check. It's genuinely tough to balance.
I think you see something very similar, but more so, play out about black abortion. I would say the prolife white religious people I know, even southern ones andd very conservative ones, legitimately rejoice in young black mothers not aborting their children and putting them up for adoption instead (while still thinking they should be taught better values, get religion, and stop engaging in low sexual behavior). Libertarians and certain wings of the emerging non-religious right, on the other hand, seem to... well, believe others things about black abortion. That's my impression.
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