Target the Parents, Not Party Platform

The objections to even the modest tolerance language Bob Dole has proposed in the abortion plank of the GOP platform is further evidence that many of my fellow delegates to the Republican National Convention later this month will be absorbed by the debate on the rights of the unborn child. Though I am pro-choice, I share with them the desire to greatly reduce the number of abortions performed in America. It is a shocking 1.6 million per year.

But with all respect to their concern for the unborn child, they and others on both sides of the issue are ignoring the even greater and more urgent challenge to America: How we deal with all the children born to parents who are either unwilling or unable to accept the responsibility of being parents.

In 1945, the incidence of out-of-wedlock births was 1 in 25. Today, it is 1 in 3. In our inner cities, it rises to more than 3 out of 4. Children born into fatherless homes are five times more likely to live in poverty, twice as likely to drop out of high school. Fatherless girls are three times more likely to end up as unwed teen mothers. Fatherless boys are overwhelmingly more likely to end up behind bars.

We are forced to build too many prisons instead of libraries and laboratories because absent fathers have defaulted on their fundamental responsibility to their sons. At the same time, we have witnessed an explosion in the number of single women on welfare because women without education, marketable skills or self-esteem can earn little money and less respect.

How do we reverse 50 years of growing out-of-wedlock births and deteriorating families?

We must begin by recasting our culture. That will not happen by advocating an anti-abortion constitutional amendment that has no hope of being enacted because it is overwhelmingly opposed by a majority of Americans.

What we must do is say to every teenage girl that it is morally wrong for her to get pregnant and to bring a child into the world unless she has a father for her child. Both parents must be prepared--emotionally and financially--to raise that child. Their child is their responsibility, not the taxpayers’.

We have to fundamentally reform our welfare system. In California, we have cut what were the nation’s second-highest welfare checks by 20% to make work more attractive. We saved taxpayers $9 billion, but more important, doubled the number of welfare recipients who have moved off the welfare rolls and onto a payroll. We have changed the law so welfare mothers no longer receive bigger and bigger checks for having more children while on welfare. We require teenage welfare mothers to stay in school to learn the skills that will get them off welfare.

However, we must also focus on the men who are making them welfare mothers. If young men who impregnate women lack the basic decency to send love to their children, they must at least send money. If they do not, we track them down and dock their pay for child support. We lift their license to drive a car or practice law.

We also prosecute the older men who victimize young girls. More than half the babies born to teenage girls are fathered by adult men, not boys.

Government must never decide who can have children. But society does have a responsibility to discourage from having children those who cannot or will not accept the responsibility of parenthood. We are using mass media to teach abstinence to our children. For those who choose to have sex but reject the burden of parenthood, we must make contraception the available choice and the moral obligation to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

But what about those children already growing up without loving parents? To expect that we can change young attitudes and change young lives, we have to offer kids hope. They must believe they have a future.

No government program that seeks to modify or prevent adolescent behavior can be very effective unless its lessons are reinforced by a strong, caring adult in a child’s life. Even if it is only for an hour a week, a mentor--whom a child trusts and respects as a role model worth emulating--can change the kind of adult that child becomes. Groups like Big Brothers/Big Sisters and the 100 Black Men of Los Angeles have proved that. They have done it by changing lives, one child at a time. That is why we have launched an ambitious effort across California to provide volunteer mentors to 1 million at-risk kids over the next four years.

Nothing will have a more profound impact on the future of this nation than successfully reversing the irresponsible behavior that sentences children to lives of wasted opportunity and despair. The best answer for curbing the social pathology of fatherless America is abstinence, contraception and mentors. This will have far greater impact on the number of abortions performed in America than any party platform can ever hope to have.