The Sun Journal’s recent four-part article about single mothers was timely. Certainly there are single mothers with good child care, jobs and support systems who successfully raise their children, but many young women are looking desperately for someone (anyone) to love them. All too often, they discover that the “love of their life” never loved them and will not provide child support or help raise the baby.

The boyfriends disappear and the women are forced to become “welfare moms” because they cannot afford child care, job training or transportation to a job. The men are untouched — perfectly free to ruin other women’s chances at a prosperous life, repeating the cycle of “get them pregnant and abandon them.”

We need to teach boys that real men do not get unmarried women pregnant and then abandon them to sad lives of poverty and welfare. Birth control is the responsibility of both men and women and if someone cannot afford it, the state should furnish it, thus saving welfare money in the future.

Right now, those men have no incentive to change their behavior. Every one of them should be tracked down, made to provide child support and offered free vasectomies. If men who are not willing to support their own children would use birth control there would be a significant drop in the need for welfare.

Society needs to stop placing all the blame on the single women and go after the deadbeat men.

Ellen Field, New Gloucester

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