The correlation between family structure and poverty rates has been studied for several decades. A watershed year was 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was then working in President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration and is now a U.S. Senator from New York, authored a report on the black family in America and the relationship between illegitimacy and the cycle of poverty. Moynihan warned that rising illegitimacy rates in the black community would lead to various social problems, including higher rates of poverty. Moynihan's predictions appear to have come true. At the time the report was released, the illegitimacy rate for black Americans was 26 percent; by 1993, it stood at 69 percent. Moreover, the increase in illegitimacy has not been limited to the black community: The illegitimacy rate among white Americans rose from 2.29 percent in 1965 to 24 percent in 1993.

Statistics suggest that there is a...