Why we must restigmatize the institution of illegitimacy.

In keeping with the policy of The Humanist to consider the diverse social, political, and philosophical viewpoints of its readers, this occasional feature allows for the expression of alternative and dissenting views on issues of importance to the humanist community.

No snowflake in an avalanche

ever feels responsible.

--Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

I have come to the painful conclusion that public policy must look at the total impact of a program, not its impact on isolated individuals; public policy must look at the big picture. Take the area of health care. We have made a grave mistake trying to build a health care system an individual at a time. There is a divergence between what is good for the individual and what is good for the total population.

When you wonder why the United States ranks twenty-second in infant mortality and eleventh in maternal mortality, and has such poor life expectancy rates for both men and women compared to other developed countries, you can see that we have focused too much on the individual. No one asks what policies produce the most healthy people in a society. We fly newborn children--born to some of the 600,000 American women last year who did not have adequate prenatal care--in helicopters to million dollar neonatal care units, where we put them on million dollar machines. The fastest growing use of kidney dialysis is for people over the age of eighty five; yet 41.2 million Americans do not have basic health insurance. We have no sense of proportion or priorities.

Individually, it might be morally difficult to say to an eighty seven year old with Alzheimer's that he or she can not have a heart bypass operation. But in the context of the society that has a myriad of other unmet needs, it is totally justifiable.

Sometimes it makes for bad press. In Oregon, it was decided not to pay for any soft tissue transplants until all women received prenatal care. The first person needing a transplant was a seven year old boy named Colby Howard (who was probably fatally ill regardless of a transplant). He did not get a transplant and he died on the front page of newspapers across America. Lost in the bad publicity was the fact that Oregon was actually adopting a policy which would save more people, and that it was not a cruel policy but actually a kind policy. About the same time, California decided to pay for transplants. Then, one week later, it knocked 270,000 low income women off Medi-Cal.

Which state killed the most people? A number of studies show that California killed far more people by not stepping up to the plate and setting priorities than Oregon did by setting its priorities. The point remains: you can not build social policy an individual at a time. Someone must look at the big picture.

This same type of reasoning applies to the question of restigmatizing illegitimacy. Certainly, we cannot justify the stigmatization of an individual child as illegitimate (as in "you bastard"), but we must restigmatize illegitimacy as an institution.

We now know that every social pathology on America's growing list of social pathologies correlates to illegitimacy. Whether it is crime, juvenile delinquency, spousal abuse, drug use, dropping out of school, poor grades in school, or juveniles being parents of illegitimate children, all of these factors directly correlate to illegitimacy. We must not consider illegitimacy just another life style equal to the nuclear family. We cannot continue to tell women there is nothing wrong with having an out of wedlock child and that single parenthood is just another accept able life style in a range of acceptable life styles. We know that as dysfunctional single parent families proliferate, they pass failure on from generation to generation, multiplying the social pathologies that flow out of illegitimacy.

These social pathologies correlate to illegitimacy at every income level, but they are particularly intense for people living in poverty. Here, the combination of poverty and lack of the father in a home geometrically increases the troubles and the pattern of failures into which these children fall. The status, admittedly, is not the fault of the children; it is the conduct of the parents we are trying to change. If society expresses its disapproval--that is, restigmatizes illegitimacy--at least it will start to make a statement that this life style is causing chaos in America.

I believe we should express societal disapproval of illegitimacy, much as we have adopted policies that express disapproval of smoking. This disapproval is not only appropriate, it is long overdue. From a societal standpoint, this is not a cruel policy; this is a kind policy.

Editor's Note:

Since Richard Lamm stated two years ago on PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour that the time had come to "restigmatize illegitimacy," numerous humanists, speaking out in various fora, have taken exception to his view. Here, the former governor of Colorado clarifies his position, contrasting the individual and the social good in a way that is sure to generate further discussion.

Richard D. Lamm, former governor of Colorado and recent aspirant to the presidential nomination of Ross Perot's Independence Reform Party, is director of the Center for Public Policy and Contemporary Issues at the University of Denver. He was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association in 1993.