Jesse Washington, an Associated Press reporter, finally gave No Wedding, No Womb, which I wrote about a couple of months ago, the AP treatment. That means, of course, the story says something like this: Here is this problem, here's what some people say, and here's what some people say against it. I'm not going to rehash the issues I have with the effort, started by a blogger named Christelyn Karazin (I should say, in the interest of full disclosure, that Tracy Clayton, who is quoted as being critical of Karazin in the piece, is a blog friend of mine). But I will just point out this: Washington repeats the same problematic assertion that Karazine did: That there haven't been discussions about single mothers in the public or policy sphere at all and that this effort is a new thing:
As the issue of black unwed parenthood inches into public discourse, Carroll is among the few speaking boldly about it. And as a black woman who has brought thousands of babies into the world, who has sacrificed income to serve Houston's poor, Carroll is among the few whom black women will actually listen to. ...
This issue entered the public consciousness in 1965, when a now famous government report by future senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan described a "tangle of pathology" among blacks that fed a 24 percent black "illegitimacy" rate. The white rate then was 4 percent.
How can it be "inching in" if it entered it in 1965? Ugh! Also, I'd like to point out that an ob/gyn who's counseling her patients to get married is problematic, but I wouldn't want a doctor treating women in a low-income apartment complex to get in trouble.
-- Monica Potts
