For example, within living memories, a teenage girl getting pregnant outside marriage was a catastrophe — for herself. Consequently, most young women were eager to avoid that fate.

This rewiring was done with the best of intentions. Only a few young women ever get pregnant outside marriage, so why let them suffer? But the consequence of the rewiring has been to encourage teenage pregnancy on a vast scale and destroy much of the basis of society.

I think the reaction on each side of the Atlantic has been two different varieties of socialism. On the European side, the socialism is obvious.

Yet, a form of socialism also exists in the United States through mandated child support. In theory, the man is supposed to be responsible for his child. In reality, government mandated child support leads to the creation of a bureaucratic apparatus theoretically intended to force a man to pay for his child’s upbringing.

If a woman doesn’t want to pay for raising child, she can legally kill the child. It’s called abortion. If a man doesn’t want to pay for raising that same child, he often tries to convince the mother to kill her child so he won’t get socked with paying child support.

Then, there are the deadbeat dads. What do you do then, especially when the man had been married? Some men will refuse to work at all rather than get taxed for child support. We are dealing with tradeoffs. The present system in the United States requires child support, but in the worst cases women and children get worse than nothing – the hope of getting something while getting nothing more than lame excuses.

Then, there are the prostitutes. If you had to choose, would you rather see a young woman with mouths to feed become a welfare mother or sell sex to men? There are quite a few prostitutes who are proud of being professional criminals rather than feeling degraded by welfare bureaucrats.

Let’s say there’s a divorced woman with three children, a woman who was abandoned because her husband fell in love with another man. If she works, she essentially abandons her children to a babysitter, day care, or latchkey status. If she doesn’t work, she can spend time with her children but gets sneered at for being on welfare. But if she sells sex for a living, she isn’t on welfare and gets to spend time with her children – if the police don’t catch her and take her children away!

Yes, the family is a good idea. I am worried that state intervention ostensibly to support and help families, particularly to “keep them together”, only succeeds in turning the family into an arm of the State.

Is it better to create a vast bureaucratic apparatus to force deadbeat dads to pay child support or is it better to simply give all women a flat stipend in lieu of future child support obligations by men?

Historically, marriage was supposed to be a protection for women against men who take advantage of women and then leave, never to be seen again. Marriage was also a customary institution. I am not so sure the government has any business conferring any special status to married couples at all.

Insofar as a government recognizes marriage, it should be seen as a contract or a partnership, complete with clauses on how the childcare will be paid for. The question remains how far we as a society are willing to go for a government to enforce the terms of a marriage contract.

In previous eras, religious custom imposed the terms of the marriage contract. Yet, in our present age of religious confusion, husbands and wives often don’t comprehend either their partner’s expectations or their own. It’s like a blank contract upon which each person projects his or her fantasy and then feels betrayed when the other person doesn’t live up those unstated fantasies.

We need to consider the importance of men in the lives of children. If a father leaves a family, what other men should the children see around them? If a mother works for a living and the only men her sons see are gangsters, this isn’t much of an improvement over a mother on welfare living where the only men her sons see are gangsters.

Let’s not presume that the American system of social services is any less imposing than Europe’s system. Let’s not let our desire for the ideal family get converted into a government mandate to turn marriage – and family life – into a Procrustean bed.