Before the white folks Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s (that too many Black folk are still somehow abiding by...), the laws and culture of the society did place responsibility for reproduction and child-raising on both females and males. The enforcing institution was called MARRIAGE.
Folks were supposed to be married BEFORE they had children. In fact, having a child out-of-wedlock was grounds for having the child taken away by older relatives or the state back then.
Our parents and grandparents will tell stories of how pregnant teen girls and young women would be "sent down South" from the North once they became pregnant out of wedlock. In those instances, the baby would be taken away from the mother, to be raised and cared for by older, married relatives (grandparents, aunts and uncles).
This is also why we had "shotgun marriages" when an unmarried pregnant couple would suddenly head to the altar.
When marriage was rejected in the 1960s and 1970s by the Sexual Revolution and the Feminist Movement as a tool of the "patriarchy" and "male control," so-called "casual sex," women's contraception called The Pill, and a woman' unrestricted right to abort pregnancies were all heavily promoted. Marriage and religious doctrine was rejected.
It was during this period that the out-of-wedlock birth rate skyrocketed, and for vulnerable Black folk just coming out of the 1960s Civil Rights legal battles, the concept of the married, two-parent Black family was irreparably harmed. The fabric of the stable Black community was forever negatively impacted.
The women's movement chant "My Baby, My Body, My Choice" said everything that needed to be said about the big shift in where modern responsibility has been placed for when children are brought into the world. And sadly, children have been the biggest victims of this change.
Yeah it's them nikkas fault, but I still chose to be around them type of people
