Single Mother oxymoron

In the human family there is really no such thing as a "single mother. The very idea is a nonsensical legal fiction, a semantic contradiction. "Single" and "mother" cannot complement each other, since they denote states that are mutually exclusive in terms of biological functions. Human females that are birth mothers always have a male partner, which means that these mothers cannot properly be termed "single".

More correctly, we might say there are "unmarried mothers", or perhaps elaborate further with "mothers who function absent fathers".