I am a physician who reads imaging studies done through the E.R. At least 50 percent of the patients after hours are illegals from Mexico and don't pay our bills. I get extremely annoyed having to stay up at night to do this work free when I struggled to do things legally to become a naturalized citizen. Thanks for speaking out.

I cannot believe that one of the people responded to this article comparing the Spanish to the Scots or Irish. First of all divorce was not an option; neither was being a mother out-of-wedlock an option.

I teach high school in an Hispanic neighborhood in the San Gabriel Valley. The teen pregnancy rate is alarming, but parents readily accept the fact that their teen daughters are knocked up by some punk-ass loser who's earning minimum wage at some dead-end job and refuses to marry their hija. When I confront my own pregnant students about the choice they have made, I never hear any concern about the child they are bringing into the world. They usually say something like, "Don't worry. I'm still going to graduate." Hispanic girls feel no shame about coming to school with their bellies hanging out. There are no taboos. On the other hand, these girls are proud and happy to be carrying a child who will most likely perform poorly in school, repeat the cycle, and very possibly end up in the criminal justice system. Some of them plan to shack up with the sire or move in with his family or vice versa. If I suggest adoption as a way of ensuring a better future for the innocent life they have created, girls respond with shock and indicate that giving up a child for adoption is despicable and unconscionable.

School districts need to grow some balls and start expelling pregnant teens and their inseminators. There should be no welfare for these reckless, naive and irresponsible kids. Citizenship should not be conferred upon the children of non-citizens. Of course, none of this will happen. Slowly but surely, bit by bit, little by little, the wonderful country the Greatest Generation bequeathed to us is slipping and sliding into irrecoverable ruin.

I have been serving in Honduras during the summers since Mitch hit in 1997. I have talked to many Christian Hondurans engaged in service there. I have talked to Honduran friends about the seeming cyclical illegitimacy rate. I know devout Honduran men who grew up with single mothers who had had multiple partners who fathered their children. These men are 40 and older. They say they believe in fidelity, but each one of them has fallen more than once, and fathered children they don't support.

The women talk like this is just the way it is, and really the culture is matriarchal in that everybody lives with the single matriarchs of the family. There are few patriarchs. What I did notice was the difference in the isolated Mayan villages to the north. These men seem to marry the women and parent the children. I have been very curious about this because of our degenerative statistics on birth, marriage and divorce.

We think this is a new problem, meaning it came with the sexual freedom of the '60s. But that is not the case for Latin America, and it has been generations. I am curious, and still exploring whether marriage was ever strong in Latin America.

I was very interested to read your findings, which match my experiences in Central America. Thank you for a thoughtful look at a growing problem.

In the early twentieth century Anglo-Saxon Americans were
saying much the same about your Scots-Irish forbears. Nothing breeds illegitimacy more than poverty. "Now, it's all about fast money, drugs, and sex." Don't blame it on what you call Hispanic culture: this is impoverished Latin America being thoroughly and heartbreakingly Americanized. I blame Paris Hilton and rap stars. I blame a broken immigration policy and racist "solutions" like the Minutemen. I blame the multinational corporations currently plundering Latin America more than I blame Hispanic culture.

As for the burgeoning Hispanic birth rate, all I can say is, "usted debe considerar probablemente el aprender de
espanol, mijita."