Is to rely so heavily on letters to her "Dear Prudence" pseudonym. Well, of COURSE these people are going to have problems raising a child on their own since they feel they have to write to a total stranger for advice.

Yoffe completely fails to note that there are (at least) two types of single parents. There are those who are educated, affluent and emotionally stable who want to have a child on their own. And there are the lower-class, under-educated and under-achieving whom a child just happens to. Lumping the two together makes as much sense as just looking at the nationwide gas mileage figures when trying to determine the numbers for each individual car.

The second mistake is to base her "scientific" arguments on studies of children who were born in the seventies. Her whole point is that women are increasingly likely to have children out of wedlock - as the original poster said, this means that different kinds of women are making this choice.

So if well-educated, well-off women decide that they would rather have a child in their fertile years and not commit to a legal instrument, you can't expect the consequences of this choice to be the same as those of having a child as a teen mother.

The last thing, is that no research can say that having children out of wedlock is bad for the children, compared to that same woman in a marriage with the children's father. The fact is that you can compare similar children in different situations, but when women don't marry the child's father, there is a reason for that.

Sure, unprotected casual sex leading to an unwanted pregnancy is not a recipe for success. But planned parenthood out of wedlock is something still untested.

Actually, I think you make exactly the same mistake. Your bias is for the educated person who's above what another Frayster called "the heteropatriarchal institution."

Fact o' the matter is, the Slate readership doesn't breed -- intentionally or unintentionally -- at the same rate as the less-educated class. We make the policies and cultures that suit our own desires, and if it's damaging for the larger society as a whole that we give young men a free pass on their responsibilities, well, hey... Better daycare.