William Tucker (emphasis in original):

It was later, when welfare became a national issue in the 1980s, that the pieces began to fall in place. The debate was between liberals who argued welfare mothers were merely unfortunates abandoned by their boyfriends and conservatives who argued that welfare was encouraging teenagers to have illegitimate children. I realized the truth fell about halfway in between. Among the African-American I had met, it was a social custom for girls to have one or two children before getting married. Their parents would support them. Then by the time the third child came along their parents would be too old and tired and the young woman would get married. Most marriages in the community had been formed that way.

I read Herbert Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom and found the pattern stretched back into slavery. In fact you could trace it all the way to Africa, where men have much weaker paternal rights and women commonly have one or two "children of fortune" before choosing a husband. This produced a kind of lottery, where men surrendered some paternal claims for the chance to sow their own "children of fortune." It also allowed girls to prove their fertility, an important thing in a fairly monogamous society.

All this made it clear why the American welfare system had had such a disastrous effect on black family formation. Traditionally, women had had one or two children and then married. The welfare system intervened precisely at the point where they married. Instead of marrying the father of their child, they married the state. The result was something unprecedented in human history — a culture in which single motherhood became the norm[. . . .]

Strangely enough, it wasn't my experience with single mothers that made me begin to doubt the virtue of my efforts. It was a visit I made [in Alabama in 1970] to an elderly couple. I've told this story many times but still consider it the starting point of my migration over to conservatism.

The elderly couple owned a small property near the edge of town where they had farmed for many years. They were in their 80s but still working the land. Some people in town had told me about them and I went out to make my pitch. I met them working in their fields. They stood listening for a few minutes in that way Southern blacks had, politely nodding their heads while I told them about the wonders of the welfare system. They were old enough, they were sure to qualify, it would be a nice check every month.

As I carried on I suddenly realized the man had tears in his eyes. It came across me in a rush. They had worked on this land all their lives, feeding themselves, raising children, fending off god knows what kind of adversity — and now I was telling them they could become dependent on the government. I finally apologized and left. I left that field thinking, "I wonder if I'm doing the right thing down here."