NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {T} he Biden administration has proposed replacing gender-specific terms such as “mother” and “father” with the gender-neutral term “parent” for the purposes of child-support laws. According to the Office of Child Support Services (OCSS), the change will make its work “inclusive of all family structures” and recognize “developments in State laws regarding parentage establishment.” Really, the administration is doubling down on its ideological commitment to undermining the sex-based realities and responsibilities of family life.
The Biden administration’s OCSS, Administration for Children and Families, and Department of Health and Human Services argue that the millions of families served by the child-support-services program are “becoming increasingly diverse” and “varied” in their family structures. Compared with previous generations, this is true. The percentage of children who live with their mothers only has doubled since 1968. According to 2019 data from Pew, the U.S. now has the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households.
The Institute for Family Studies (IFS) found that, in 2020, “the proportion of children living with both birth parents was just over 63%, while the proportion living with a single birth parent was just under 25 percent.” Nevertheless, the IFS also noted some encouraging (albeit small) developments. In 2019, a little more than 53 percent of high-school seniors were living with both biological parents, which, although it was about 10 percent lower than it was in 1996, represented “a modest recovery when compared with parallel findings from 2012.” The proportion of black children being raised by their biological fathers as well as birth mothers has also seen a modest rebound since 2012, up from 24 percent to 30 percent in 2019.
Surely the Biden administration ought to be encouraging these steps in the right direction. After all, when parents do their jobs, the government saves on time and resources.
Fatherless children are significantly more likely to be incarcerated than those who grow up in two-parent households. Single mothers are twice as likely as married mothers to experience depression. In the recently published book The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, Melissa S. Kearney, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, argues that the decline of marriage has caused economic decline. All this is to say nothing of the effects of family disruption on children, which include an increased risk of behavioral, mental, and substance-abuse problems.
Step, single, and adoptive parents can of course be good and loving parents. But they nevertheless arrive at parenthood through tragic circumstances: the fracturing, one way or another, of a child’s family of origin. It is one thing for the government to facilitate the legal transfer of parental rights and responsibilities in the sad event that a child’s biological parents are unable to raise him, or to represent a child’s interests when parents fail in their obligations. It is another thing for the government to be actively encouraging family disintegration.
Yet that is exactly what the Biden administration’s “gender-neutral” framework does. It holds single-parenthood as no less ideal than two-parent households. It suggests that fathers and mothers are interchangeable, that neither role is essential. And it has given rise to a for-profit industry in which children are artificially conceived and intentionally deprived of at least one biological parent.
Democratic lawmakers in California have gone so far as to redefine “infertility”— a medical condition affecting either one or both halves of the male–female reproductive system — to include same-sex couples who would like to have children but obviously cannot without involving a third party. Title IV-D of the Social Security Act requires states to have laws permitting “the establishment of paternity and requiring genetic testing in contested paternity cases.” Yet it’s legal for men to father nearly 100 children via sperm donation without anything ever being expected of them.
In the proposed rules — which the public has until November 27 to comment on — the Biden administration implies that it’s simply responding to societal and legal trends when, really, it is actively promoting them. Biden has signed various executive orders enshrining LGBTQ ideology into federal anti-discrimination legislation, requiring schools to advance the idea that, in family life, absent mothers or fathers are just as ideal as present ones.
Child-support laws have always been poor substitutes for present fathers, just as court-ordered custody arrangements are poor substitutes for happily married parents. The less the government is involved in family life the better. But as the number of broken families increases, so too does the need for intervention.
The answer to the problems of family life isn’t “gender-neutral” policy but quite the opposite. Re-establishing the high ideals in which family members honor their obligations to one another begins with recognizing that children need both their mother and father, and that the intact family unit is the cornerstone of society.