If South Carolina continues on the trend of the last thirty years, we will become a state of bastards, crime will rise, a larger and larger percentage of the population will be unemployable in a high-tech economy, and life will be poor and nasty.

Jim Hite is a senior fellow of the Strom Thurmond Institute of Government and Public Affairs at Clemson University of South Carolina . where he is an alumni professor of agriculture and applied economics , Wrote this in 1999 .

In 1960, about one baby out of every eight born in South Carolina was born out of wedlock. In 1993, almost one out of every three babies born in the state were to a single parent.
While the problem is more pronounced in the African-American population, it is also a growing trend among whites. This startling trend is full of ominous significance for the future of South Carolina. Children born to single mothers, especially teenage mothers, come into the world with two strikes against them.
In the first place, children without fathers present are more likely to be poor. Almost half of the households headed by a single female are in poverty. According to the 1995 Kids Count Report, " Children in father-absent families are five times more likely to be poor and ten times more likely to be extremely poor."
Girls from single-parent families are three times more likely to become pregnant themselves while still teenagers (which means the problem feeeds on itself), and boys from such families are at greatly increased risks of dropping out of school, being unemployed, going to jail, and being uninvolved with their own children.
It is probably fair to say that this enormous increase in the number of children born out of wedlock is the single biggest threat to the future of South Carolina. It poses almost insurmountable difficulties for our schools, our law enforcement agencies, and ultimately for economic development.
Doing something about the problem requires, first, that we have some reasonable idea of the causes. There are some clues that tell us the causes are not unique to South Carolina. The same trend toward out of wedlock births is evident nationwide and even in most industrialized nations. Whatever is wrong is bigger than South Carolina or even the United States. And since the problem has grown in the last thirty years, the causes are relatively recent in origins.
Two possible causes come to mind. The first, one dear to the hearts of conservatives, is the growth of the welfare state, both in this country and overseas. Out of wedlock births clearly have risen in all those nations where welfare programs have grown up in the past thirty years. So there may be a casual relationship.
Another possibility is the increase in electronic media with all its subliminal messages that glorify sex. Teenagers have never behaved very rationally when it comes to sex. In early South Carolina there was always a big increase in local illegitimate births about nine months after big revival meetings that brought teenagers together and stirred up their emotions. But the big increase we now see in illegitimate birth is correlated with the TV generation. If teenagers are constantly bombarded with music and television that re-enforce their already strong sex drives, we must expect them to keep having babies at alarming rates.
Whatever the causes, this problem must be dealt with or it willl increase at exponential rates. If South Carolina continues on the trend of the last thirty years, we will become a state of bastards, crime will rise, a larger and larger percentage of the population will be unemployable in a high-tech economy, and life will be poor and nasty.
What can be done? There are no easy answers. Welfare reform might help, but taken alone, without some dampening of the sexual content of media messages, we cannot expect welfare reform by itself to solve the problem. Until we face up to the fact that teenagers are struggling to deal with hormones .

ANSWER ; Child Support Study

Researchers studying the factors behind out-of-wedlock births have found a significant variable that often is overlooked: child support.

States that are strict in enforcing child support have up to 20 percent fewer unmarried births than states that are lax about getting unmarried dads to pay, the researchers found.
The better the enforcement of child support, the more the cost of childbearing shifts from unmarried women to their partners," said lead author Robert Plotnick, a professor at the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Affairs. "This may make men more reluctant to become unwed fathers."

To document the link, Plotnick and three other social scientists teamed up to compare the toughness of each state's child support enforcement to the chances that women living in that state had out-of-wedlock births. Using a national sample of 5,195 women of childbearing age, they found a significant correlation between tougher enforcement and less chance of having unmarried births.

Since children of single parents run a higher risk of poverty and other social ills, policymakers have sought to stem the tide of unmarried births, only to see the rate rise from well under 10 percent of births in the 1960s to roughly a third of all U.S. births today.

Study co-author Irwin Garfinkel of Columbia University said most programs to discourage single parenthood -- such as restrictions on welfare benefits -- focus on the mothers.

"Decisions about sexual intercourse and marriage involve two people," Garfinkel said. "But research and policy debates have largely failed to recognize men's role in childbearing and how government policies may influence their behavior."

Plotnick, Garfinkel, and co-authors Sara McLanahan of Princeton University and Inhoe Ku of Seoul National University in South Korea theorized that forcing unmarried fathers to support their children financially might deter them from letting a pregnancy occur, or else motivate them to marry the mother if it did.

To test the theory, the researchers analyzed how well states do at identifying their unmarried dads and getting them to pay. Eight categories of child-support laws were tracked, covering everything from paternity testing to wage withholding. The researchers also measured the amount each state spent on child-support enforcement, divided by the number of single mothers. And to gauge the effectiveness of these measures, they calculated how the amount of child support collected compared to the amount that was owed.

The state-by-state measures of enforcement then got matched to national data on families from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics during 1980-93, the most recent period available.

The correlation between strictness of enforcement and rate of unmarried births was significant. Indeed, the results suggest that if every state had on its books at least six (out of a possible eight) child-support laws during the period, this would have cut the national rate of nonmarital childbearing by 17 percent.

Moreover, according to the results, if all 50 states had done at least as well in their enforcement efforts as the state ranked fifth from the top, that would have led to a 20 percent reduction in out-of-wedlock births.

"Any program that reduced out-of-wedlock childbearing by 17 to 20 percent," said Plotnick, "would be viewed as a major success."

While many states have continued to tighten up child support policies since the study's data were collected, even as recently as 2002 only one state (New Jersey) collected on at least 80 percent of its child support orders, according to Columbia University's National Center for Children in Poverty. Five states collected on fewer than four out of 10 such orders.

The main purposes of child support enforcement, of course, are to improve children's wellbeing and cut public welfare costs, but the researchers concluded that a reduction in unmarried births was an overlooked side benefit.

"Social policies sometimes have unintended bad side effects," Plotnick said, "so it's nice to see one that has positive impacts."

The paper is titled "The Impact of Child Support Enforcement Policy on Nonmarital Childbearing." The research was supported by the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington and a grant from the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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For more information, contact: Plotnick (206) 685-2055 or

plotnick@u.washington.edu