Speaker 2
mother nature got it exactly right. I got to raise some of the feminist objections, they're right. This is the moment to what some feminists would say is, hold up, just think how much abuse takes place within the nuclear family model. Just think of the terrible things that biological fathers do to their children in terms of physical abuse, sexual abuse, abuse of mothers. This is no fairytale. We can easily come up with lots of examples of this being a very long way from the ideal child-run scenario. Thinking, for instance, about lesbian women conceiving through sperm donation, you might say, will look like the person in a child's life most likely to be violent is the father. I mean, I would qualify this by saying it's actually stepfathers. I'm sure we'll get on to this. But this is the argument. Isn't it safer for children to actually be in a house just with women because it's removing that potential source of male aggression from the
Speaker 1
abuse by biological parents is a reality. And I would say that those parents are the most guilty of not putting them before us. They're the most guilty of failing to prioritize the needs of children in their home. They deserve condemnation and criminal consequences in a lot of cases. The problem for feminists or anybody else that would raise the argument that I'm being too rigid by saying it's biological parents that advantage children is you are working against everything that we know about family structure. So this idea that children are disadvantaged by unrelated adults, be they unrelated men or unrelated women, is so prevalent that evolutionary biologists have a term for it. And it's called the Cinderella effect. And it is exactly what it sounds like. That children who are raised by a step parent are much more likely to suffer abuse and neglect, or simply even if they're not directly being abused by the unrelated adult in their home, they are more likely to suffer tragic accidents in the home if it's not their own mother and father raising them. So yeah, you can find examples of abusive biological parents. The problem is that there's no other family formation that reduces the risk of that children will be abused. Now, if a husband, biological father is being violent, like that is literally why we used to have something called at fault divorce, where the court could then reward the innocent spouse with custody and with money and with the house. And no fault divorce sort of strips the legal system of being able to advantage the innocent spouse in that way. So I think there should be huge legal penalties for abusive adults. But if you think that you can just swap any adult into a child's life and they're going to fare no different, you have to work against common sense natural law and the largest body of social science that we have on family structure. Or you could just fact check me right now. Let's just do a little, let's just do a little, you know, exercise. If biology doesn't matter, you know, if the adults will be happy, if the kids will be happy, you know, if maybe they just need a maternal presence and a paternal presence, if it's just two incomes that they need, then children who are living with their mother and her cohabiting boyfriend should be doing awesome. Right? So right now, why don't you just Google the words mother's boyfriend on the phone, pause the podcast or whatever you need to do, Google it and come back and let me know what you saw. And if you're joining us now after scrolling through page after page after page of the most horrific child abuse and filicide that you've ever seen, like punctured by stories of a horrifying child torture, that is what we're talking about here, right? That thank God, most stepfathers, stepmothers, boyfriends, girlfriends are not abusive. But
Speaker 1
studies have found that the presence of a cohabiting adult is one of the leading predictors of child abuse. Brad Wilcox, who's the leading sociologist in the United States has said, the most dangerous place a child can find themselves in America is in the home with a cohabiting unrelated man who's left to care for the child on his own. If you want to play around with the idea that biology is irrelevant, you are playing around with the lives of children.