The Moynihan Report: The Negro Family - The Case For National Action (Dr. David Stoltze's diary entry for October 7, 1977: What Happens When Uneducated Teenagers Give Birth, With Particular Reference To The Experience Of The Black Community)

PBS: The Moynihan Report

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/explaining-the-moynihan-report-43oqki/31827/

October 7, 1977, Day #186

Dear M,

Sorry I’ve lost touch with you for a while. I couldn’t find you when I passed through Santa Fe in July. Hope to see you again in late October, when I plan on coming into town again.

I’m on OB/GYN now, working in the labour and delivery area this month. Life in general is going well for me. Every once in a while though, I get horrified at the fact that certain of the individuals I deal with are actually going to be raising children! This, I know, has a clear tendency to sound racist, but I don’t think it’s entirely that. Most of the women I deliver will probably turn out to be more or less good parents. But, in my opinion, having children as relatively uneducated teenagers is disastrously limiting on their own personal development. But once in a while we get someone who is so obviously unfit to be a parent that it’s just bizarre to even think about it. Today, I had to deal with the ridiculously histrionic 300 pound 16-year-old woman. I’m sure she was barely intelligent enough to get herself pregnant in the first place. Totally immature, too. Screaming and yelling every minute, refusing to let anyone even touch her. I had to start an IV on her, which she promptly pulled out. Nobody ever did examine her at all prior to her delivering. And this person is going to be responsible for the life of a little Black baby. I despair.

David

David Stoltze

6:15 PM Jul 20

My own version of the Moynihan report? Perhaps I should cite this

Alan Archibald

11:36 AM Today

The Moynihan Report deserves the widest possible circulation. https://share.google/aimode/jwAOUIOt9mHyiZaqD

Alan Archibald

12:48 PM Today

Speaking of despair, I am despairing of Democracy unless a certain critical mass of the electorate is well-educated - a circumstance I always distinguish, strictly, from "well-instructed." 

As a people, we are too well-instructed and woefully uneducated. 

Instruction And Education Aim At Antipodes

https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2024/11/instruction-and-education-aim-at.html

Compendium Of Best "Pax" Posts On The Cornerstone Necessity Of Education

https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2020/07/compendium-of-best-pax-posts-on.html

As a practical matter, I think the black churches provided necessary counterbalance, and in the toss-up between "serviceable religion based on communities (informed by The Common Good and overt recognition that we comprise one Human Family) on the one hand, and the toxicity of Compulsive Capitalist Consumerism on the other,  I'm ready for that kind of "good ol' religion" ANY DAY. 

How The Dictatorship Of Capitalist Consumerism Created A Nation Of Disengaged Dropouts With Zero Interest In Learning

https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2025/09/how-dictatorship-of-capitalist.html

Unregulated "Cowboy" Capitalism (In Memes): Capitalism Is The Foremost Propellant Of Moral And Environmental Degradation In America And In The World -- A Propellant Rendered Nearly Invisible By Plutocrats (And Now, Kakistocrats) Who "Divide And Conquer" Via The Idiocracy's Age-Old Manipulation Of Public Opinion

https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2024/02/capitalism-is-america-and-worlds.html

I think the Left still must come to terms with the fact that, when it comes to religion, we threw out the baby with the bathwater. 

However, "good" Catholic Moynihan was an exception to this wasteful rule, and "saw" clearly because he had "good Catholicism" in his bones, while the secular Left pretty much disdained him for his fundamentally valid insight that the black community (particularly in the inner cities) had taken a wrong turn.

(I would describe "good Catholocism" as the fundamental embodiment of the Catholic spirit by Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV.)