SINGLE MOM MYTHOLOGY FROM THE HUFFINGTON POST !!!

[Daanyeer]

Source: mensdaily
By Robert Franklin, Esq. | Apr 19, 2009


This is another "exploits of the single mom" piece that pretends to deal with single motherhood but doesn't (Huffington Post, 4/13/09). It's an interview with one Christine Coppa, 26, who's the single mother of a son. She says she and the child's father had unprotected sex knowing she wasn't on the pill, and when she turned up pregnant, he left. The interview is short and superficial, so I went to Coppa's blog site to see if there was any depth there. Nope, not much.

Coppa's a writer. When she got pregnant, she landed a gig with Glamour magazine to blog about being pregnant and single. In the middle of that, she got a deal to write a book about being a single mother. So Coppa is that rarest of birds, the single mother who has a well-paying, at-home job that combines employment and childcare in one. How many people can say that? Well, my guess is one - Christine Coppa. So just how applicable are her observations to, you know, regular people?

A significant cottage industry has grown up around single motherhood. This interview, blog and book are part of that. Has there ever been anything written about single mothers that seriously looked at the dads? In Coppa's case, as usual, we have her brief descriptions of uprotected sex and the father's abandonment of her and the baby and that's about it.

Why don't any of these journalists get up on their hind legs and go find one of the dads and interview him? Did he really know she wasn't on the pill or some other contraceptive? What caused him to leave? What does he think about her decision to carry the child to term? Did they discuss that? What did she say? What are his thoughts about fatherhood? Does he plan to return and try to take up his rights and duties?

Is it really as cut and dried as she claims? We'll never know because all the information about their relationship comes from her. For the umpteenth time, the father is voiceless.

To her credit, Coppa says the door is always open to the dad to come back to her and their son.

And to the interviewer's credit, she does ask one tough question. She asks Coppa if, given the fact that women have abortion rights and the morning after pill, should men have the right to opt out of a child's life, i.e. sign away his rights and duties. Coppa's response is telling:

I think that if a baby is born then the people who made that baby should take care of him unless a mutual decision is made that absolves one parent from the picture. There is no mutual decision in my case. In the state of New Jersey, where I live, one cannot abolish their parental rights "just because."
She takes her own abortion rights for granted, as she should, given the state of constitutional law. But she shows no understanding of the fact that those rights are in no way "mutual." One parent does indeed have the right to "absolve" herself" from the picture." When she says "one cannot abolish their parental rights 'just because,'" she's obviously wrong. "One" can do exactly that; the other cannot. She doesn't seem to understand that.

For Coppa, her rights are her rights, and from where I stand, that's as it should be. But when it comes to his rights, that's their decision, a "mutual" one. She says all this with no apparent irony.

The Guttmacher Institute which is the research arm of Planned Parenthood, and the best source of information on abortion in the United States, has data on why women choose abortion. Overwhelmingly, it's for reasons that have to do with the practicalities of childrearing. Read about it here. Women have abortions mostly because they're not ready for a child. They're too young, still in school, not financially ready or don't think their relationship with the father is stable enough. From my point of view, those are all good reasons to not have a child. People should be as ready as they can be before they bring a new person into the world.

But that only applies to women. Men of course have the identical concerns about fathering and raising children. They too want to be ready, to have a good stable job, to have a relationship with the mother that they think will last, to feel like they're mature enough to handle the responsibilities. And, as for women, I think that all makes perfect sense.

Except, as things stand now, men don't get to decide. It's like hide-n-seek; "ready or not, here I come," is the name of the fatherhood game. Again, we don't get to hear his side of it, but maybe that's why Coppa's boyfriend walked out.

Meanwhile, given her unique situation, Coppa makes single motherhood out to be pretty much a walk in the park. And for her it seems to be. She has a mother who helps and a good, stay-at-home job. And the boy is still much too young to start manifesting the behavioral problems that bespeak a fatherless upbringing. So Coppa ignores all those nitty-gritty problems that follow single motherhood wherever it goes.

It makes for a pleasant, upbeat narrative. Now, if only single motherhood were actually like that...

[Basra-]

This article is NOT about single motherhood. It is about Christine Coppa and her failed attempts to trap a man by the classic o'l traditional way of catching a husband. Thankfully, in todays world men dont have to marry women for the sake of hiding an out of wedlock child.