Assistant Senate Majority Leader Glenn Grothman, R-West Bend, thinks that America is facing an “epidemic” where women are “adopting a single motherhood lifestyle” because they are going to get paid by the government. Grothman has said “unwanted or mistimed” pregnancies are “the choice of women” and that to believe otherwise is to “undersell these women.”

Grothman thinks women are so excited by the idea of “government largesse” apparently available for being a poor single mother that they are actively getting pregnant. In an interview with Fox 6 Milwaukee, he said “As a matter of fact, I think if you ask around you will find … women who feel that their sister is in this position, if they are not in that position, are living better than they are in a variety of ways.”

Grothman was being interviewed because he has introduced a bill into the Senate that would have Wisconsin’s Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Board add single parenthood as a contributing factor to child abuse. Grothman’s evidence for suggesting this is a national study on child abuse and neglect by the U.S. department of Health and Human Services.

Specifically, one page out of a 455-page report that states “Compared to children living with married biological parents, those whose single parent had a live-in partner had more than eight times the rate of maltreatment overall, over 10 times the rate of abuse and nearly eight times the rate of neglect.”

That is a really unfortunate statistic, but both Grothman’s personal views and his ideas of what the government’s role in solving the problem should be have no place in the conversation. When asked by the interviewer if President Barack Obama’s recent birth control mandate wasn’t a more effective way to reduce unwanted pregnancies than say, creating legal language telling single mothers they are likely to be abusers, Grothman brushed it off. He said for “the vast majority of women who are having children, they are not accidents.”

Actually, the Guttmacher Institute released a study this summer that said, “at least four in 10 pregnancies were unwanted or mistimed.” But don’t tell Grothman that; in his mind, there are millions of devious women out there who are going to milk the system and raise a child by themselves.

I doubt Grothman’s bill is going anywhere, but this is just another example of the out-of-touch tone of the conversation around women and pregnancy coming from the Republican Party. We have a problem with unwanted pregnancies, but birth control isn’t the answer. We have a problem with stability in single parent homes, with women being five times as likely to be the lone parent, and the crux of the issue isn’t that men are failing to support their child but that women are running around grabbing whoever they can get their hands on so they can get food stamps.

One person alone cannot get pregnant, although with the amount of men talking about pregnancies and birth control over the past month, you might think it is only a male issue. I have heard all about “sluts” and blatant misconceptions about how birth control works and why people use it. Now I can add, “when this many women are having children out of wedlock, I would say some or many expect the government handouts to solve their problems.”

Nobody wants to start a family alone. The women that are left in that situation have one of the hardest jobs in America. At some point, are we going to talk about the father? What role does he play in all this? In a month-long national conversation about birth control, I have heard everything and more about the intentions and responsibilities of women in regard to sex and nothing about the intentions and responsibilities of men.

John Waters ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in journalism.