A Fox News co-host has made the most outlandish statement yet in a rapidly escalating rhetorical arms race this week over the role of women in the workplace.
"The Five's" Eric Bolling suggested on Wednesday that the decades-long increase in American women's earning power was actually a symptom of the "breakdown of the American family" -- spurred as it was, he claimed, by an increasing number of overextended single mothers. As a result, Bolling breathlessly suggested, a growing number of women would opt to seek abortions.
The conversation about "female breadwinners" began in earnest on Wednesday when Pew released a poll showing that women are now the primary earners in 40 percent of all American households. Responding to the research that evening, a panel on Lou Dobbs' Fox News program unanimously concluded that the data was a sign of "society dissolving around us."
One panelist, conservative pundit Erick Erickson, went so far as to claim that any liberals who argued otherwise were "anti-science," because certain species in the animal kingdom featured males in the "dominant role." Erickson would defend that claim in a blog post Thursday, lamenting that feminists and "emo lefties" simply had "their panties in a wad" about his statements.
When Bolling finally got around to making his own remarks on the topic, his argument was much the same: "If you read into that study," he said, "the reason is exactly what we've been talking about right here: the breakdown of the American family."
He continued:
American family is breaking down. Women are forced to go out, be the breadwinners for families. That's why the number's skewed higher not.
Here's another offshoot of that: If you are a single mom, breadwinner of the family, and you get pregnant, aren’t we pushing towards more abortions? It seems like we are.
As Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald points out, the Fox News contributor appears to be cherry picking data from the Pew study to hammer home his point about single mothers:
[A]lmost 40 percent of the female breadwinners identified by the survey are married mothers who have a higher income than their husbands. Married women “are more likely than before to be the primary provider in the family,” growing from 4 percent in 1960 to 23 percent in 2011. That’s faster than the rate single mothers have grown.