Posted on 06/28/2009 8:51:35 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
According to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control, 40 percent of American babies born in 2007 were born to unmarried mothers. That’s up from 34 percent only five years ago.
When most Americans hear the expression “unmarried mother,” what nearly always comes to mind is a teenage girl. But that’s not what’s driving the recent increase. In 2007, only 23 percent of the out-of-wedlock births were to unmarried teenagers. The rest were to women in their 20s, and now increasingly, in their 30s.
The increase among older women accounts for the six percentage point increase of the past five years. In 2007, 60 percent of all births to unmarried women were to women in their 20s and 17 percent to women in their 30s.
Or, as Emily Yoffe of Slate magazine put it, “the vast majority of unwed mothers are old enough to know what they're doing.” Yoffe sees these numbers as evidence of “an extraordinary decoupling of marriage and procreation.”
But what’s behind this “decoupling”?
A significant part of the answer lies in changing ideas and attitudes towards marriage. Marriage is no longer seen as an institution whose ends have a communal, as well as personal, purpose. Instead, it is an expression of private affection whose ends are almost entirely about personal fulfillment.
Thus, getting married is increasingly something you do after the rest of your life is arranged to your satisfaction. You go to school, find a job, get established in your career, and then you think about getting married. As a result, the average age when people first get married has risen by five years since 1970.
But while our ideas about marriage have changed, our natures haven’t. One thing that Christians and dyed-in-the-wool Darwinists can agree on is that we are driven to reproduce ourselves. With a few exceptions, no matter how successful we might be, many feel that if we leave no descendants behind, all the striving is beside the point.
What’s more, our biology doesn’t care about our sense of personal fulfillment. A woman’s most fertile period is her late teens to early 30s-precisely the time when young people are going to school and getting established in their careers.
Thus, the longer we put off marriage, the more difficult it will be to fulfill one of our most fundamental instincts-have a child.
Throw in the complications of meeting “Mr. Right,” getting to know him, and deciding that he’s the person you want to marry, and the “ticking clock” begins to sound like Big Ben.
So it seems that more and more women have decided to have children while they still can, regardless of their marital status. The result is, in Yoffe’s words, a “culture [that] is out of touch with the needs of children.” And I would add that what a child needs most is a stable, loving family with a mom and a dad at the helm.
Re-coupling marriage and procreation will not be easy in this “me-first” culture. That’s because marriage and having babies-as fulfilling as they are-are not about self-fulfillment. They are about love, fidelity, and self-sacrifice for the good of the other-for the spouse, for the children.
That message is a tough sell these days. But it’s a message our culture ignores at its great peril.
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From BreakPoint, May 27, 2009. Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with the permission of Prison Fellowship Ministries.
A wedding ring is a woman’s license to steal. That’s how many men view it.
When you don’t teach children responsibility and raise them on welfare, what do you expect? It doesn’t take a genious to figure it out. Unless of course you want to make money on writing articles over and over and over. Yep, let’s do another study. Even though everyone knows the answer.
The answer is pretty simple - men don’t want to get married. Our society has spent years depicting marriage and children in a negative light and promoting sex as the be-all and end-all of life. Men no longer have pride in fatherhood, and they can get all the sex they want without being married or even having a permanent relationship with a woman, so what’s the incentive?
In fairness, there are probably women like this, too. But many if not most women do want children, but they’re having trouble finding men who want them as well.
Social engineering through government has made it too costly an endeavor to be married.
Yup, bastards raised in a bureau, the very definition of socialism. I’m grateful and happy that I got to grow up and live most of my life in an America which is now only a memory.
Riding the Santa Fe Superchief and flying in a Lockheed Super Connie are among my fondest memories.
I’m thinking the “Me-First” culture that we live in is a historical fluke born of prosperity... prosperity of western civilization in general, and the US in particular. What happens as we begin the big crunch and the coming generations do not enjoy as high a standard of living as we? Do they return to the basics?
Our welfare system has made it possible for a young women immigrant to have a US citizen at the expense of the US taxpwyer. This adds greatly to the single parent families which serves the welfare state by providing more jobs and money to service their “clients”.
I’ll take draconian divorce laws for half of everything I own, ever hope to own, and everthing once owned, Alex.
No American babies are born in wedlock anymore, because genuine marriage hasn't existed in this country since no-fault divorce was introduced. The best you get here anymore is wedlatch, not wedlock—a purely temporary and severable alignment of financial interests, like an LLC only with less paperwork. Wedlatch is almost completely meaningless when it comes to the permanent legal obligations of child-raising. So the real question isn't why more babies are born outside of marriage, but why any are still born inside it.
That being said, I can't imagine tackling the job without MGD. Had single parenthood thrust itself upon either one of us, we would have done our best, of course, but I wouldn't wish that voluntarily upon anyone.
There’s another side to it—fewer and fewer men are being seen as someone a woman would want to spend the next 50 years living with. Few women are without marriage options: not enough of those options are appealing to them.
Perhaps looking at the demographics will help. Those with the highest out of wedlock rates...hispanic women and black women. Also, married women are having fewer children, driving the percentage of out of wedlock upward.
The leftwingtards have been killing off their first born at a ferocious rate. The poor, but honest common people haven't followed their lead since they love their babies.
So what happens is that in the first generation the "uptight oh so proper" people kill off their kids until they get married, and then manage to kill every other one thereafter.
The class who "jus' have babies" don't. And they may or may not get married.
Come the next generation, the "uptight oh so proper" class are fewer in number. However, their offspring who managed to survive momma's tender mercy carry out the same game plan and murder all their pre-borns prior to marriage, and half of them afterwards.
The "jus' have babies" crowd continue the same practices as always and they have kids who live to grow up to do the same thing.
After 5 generations of this stuff the "jus' have babies" crowd literally outnumber everybody else 10 to 1.
Praise God.
The numbers are there. With the Caucasian birth rate below the ‘replacement level’ our ‘Euro central’ society will be overwhelmed within two or less generations, probably by Muslims.
Because women are finding that they end up raising the child anyway. Men then become only the sperm donor.
We are reaping the logical, natural consequences of the cultural and sexual revolutions.
I don't believe draconian divorce laws are the cause of divorce either. I sympathize for those who have lost much financially in a bad marriage, but it's not the key issue.
The problem is that there is no pro-marriage attitude in America. Instead, young men are encouraged to live a footloose and unentangled life, without fatherhood. Young women want children but don't have good men to marry, so they shack up and bear what they can.
Now we see that the institution of marriage is under attack by homosexuals and polygamists.
The only regeneration of marriage is going to be internal. Young men need to find good, honest, young women and choose one to have a permanent and satisfying relationship. Money can't be the glue. ‘Freedom’ can't be the glue. It has to be the loving union of man and woman that grows and raises wanted children under the umbrella of marriage.
You make a good point, but it’s hard on the babies who are killed.
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