Single Moms Spark No Outrage

By C. Young

Thursday October 25, 2001 02:33 PM EDT

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Week after week "Friends" is right up there with "ER" as the most popular show in the United States. Its latest plotline has Rachel getting pregnant and turning down Joey's offer of marriage. "I'm not looking for a husband," she said, just one of many single moms on TV. And nobody got mad. Not a peep from social conservatives like Dan Quayle who got livid about Murphy Brown (Candace Bergen) having a baby without a husband nine years ago. "The professional single mother is no longer the pariah," said Sheri Annis, a media and political consultant, to the Los Angeles Times. "People aren't looking down on single motherhood because it's everywhere. They're concerned about the children who don't have the access to education and health care." Don DeVine, vice chairman of the American Conservative Union, attributed the lack of outrage to something else: "Most people have figured Hollywood is irretrievable and have tried to go about living their lives around it, or without it," adding, "no matter how much brainwashing Hollywood does, those conservative values stay there. It's hard to find a liberal these days that doesn't see a single mom as a problem . . . Conservatives still don't like what's going on in Hollywood and New York." According to the census, the number of single mothers in the United States grew by 27 percent from 1990 to 2000 (for a total of 7.6 million) after growing by 46 percent from 1980 to 1990.