by Bill Fancher and Rusty Pugh
One researcher says his findings regarding poverty and out-of-wedlock births indicate that President Bush's marriage initiative is a positive step for families in America.
Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Robert Rector has completed an investigative paper on the link between babies born out of wedlock and poverty. An illegitimate child is born every 25 seconds in the United States — and Rector's research shows almost all of them will face a “life of want.”
“Children born and raised outside of marriage are seven times more likely to live in poverty than those who are born inside marriage and raised by a married couple,” Rector states.
The Bush Administration has tried to combat this with its “healthy marriage initiative,” which provides $300 million a year to promote marriage. Rector's research shows that marriage can lift those families out of poverty.
But critics of the Administration's initiative argue that promoting marriage between parents of children born out of wedlock will not work. They maintain there are not enough eligible men to marry — and that most do not make the money needed by the family. But according to Rector, those arguments do not hold up to the true data.
“The median age of the father is 25, and the median annual income among these fathers is $17,500,” he says. “These fathers typically worked 50 weeks in the year prior to the child's birth. Ninety-seven percent of them held a job at some point during that year.”
Rector says these men are what he calls “very marry-able” and capable of lifting their family out of poverty, especially when the mother joins in the working effort.
Texas Pro-Life
On another family-related issue, a pro-life activist says it is hard to imagine why anyone would object to protecting the life of an unborn child whose mother chooses to give that baby life.
The Texas Legislature has brought that state in line with most other states by passing the Prenatal Protection Act. Texas Alliance for Life president Joe Pojman says the law recognizes unborn children as victims of crimes of homicide and assault, and allows parents to seek civil remedies when their unborn child is wrongfully killed.
He says when a mother makes the choice to give life, it is hard to understand why pro-abortion forces would object to that.
“This bill does nothing more than protect a woman's choice to give birth to a baby that she wants to give birth to,” he says, “but abortion providers, who claim to be 'pro-choice,' apparently believe there is only one choice — and that choice is abortion. That, in my mind, is very, very unfortunate.”
Pojman says the bill does nothing to prohibit legal abortion in Texas, but it does seek to extend the definition of personhood to include unborn children at every stage of development.
(This article courtesy of Agape Press.)
