single mothers

Though it may seem like old news now, Ann Romney’s positioning by the GOP as the epitome of womanly motherhood is important here. It is no secret that the Romney family is out-of-this-world wealthy. Ann Romney’s stayed-at-home child-rearing therefore brings up many issues, including nutrition access for the less-than-wealthy and what it is to be a mother raising children in poverty today. If “all mothers are working mothers,” as Mitt Romney would have us believe, does that include ones who are much poorer, and ones who are of in need of government assistance and better nutrition?

This week’s shiny golden douchebag statuette goes to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. A recent article published in The New York Times reported that the number of people living in households lacking consistent access to adequate food his risen to 49 million Americans. In the 14 years that the Department of Agriculture has been collecting these statistics, these are the highest ever.

A bit more data from the survey to put this in perspective: of those 49 million, one third of respondents reported that they are "outright hungry" meaning they experience frequent hunger pains, are forced to skip meals or reduce portion sizes.

The households facing the most dramatic food shortages are usually headed by single mothers. In the last year, the numbers of households reporting severe food insecurity that also contain children has swelled by almost 200,000 to top out at 506,000. Of those 506,000 households, 37% were headed by single mothers as opposed to 14% that reported married, two-parent heads.

Now this is where the d-bag factor increases exponentially in relation to the food insecurity data.