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.
Naw, you just don't want to share!
Not so fast. Another reason why young people live together, but don't marry is, believe it or not, health insurance. In today's economy, the young man's job just doesn't pay enough to cover the premiums. Sometimes he is uninsured.
If the young woman can stay under her parents' insurance for the meantime, that is what she will do. Young people are already suffering financially as it is. The liberal way has made it almost impossible to continue with a traditional lifestyle. They penalize marriage. If they stay unmarried, she and the children can get WIC and Medicaid. He's paying the taxes, but not getting anything.
Why should I share if they’re just gonna leave anyway?
deconstrucionism knows no bounds.
Level of education plays a very big role. I read somewhere that the out-of-wedlock birth rate for women with a college degree is less than 10%.
When these single parents’ children have flown the coop and they have no-one to grow old with, then they will have some regrets.
True, but we both know that's NOT how the liberals are using the the concept. When I was growing up (here is the good ol' USA) the concept was still in full effect as well. If you screwed up at school or in public, your parents knew about it. Other adults were to be respected and had command authority (within reason). But the Liberals/Communists have perverted this idea into promoting illegitimacy and demanding that men collectively take care of children, regardless of who makes them.
I have often hoped that it might be possible to turn around from economic privation. Thinking back on the Roaring Twenties, the women for the first time in Christian history wore scanty clothing, cut off their hair, smoked and wore makeup and processed hair, ran around in cars and went to nightclubs against their parents' wishes, and there was a huge traffic in cocaine and illegal whiskey.
Fast forward to 1929 and the Depression, and then to the 30s, 40s and 50s, which were probably the most conservative decades in a century. Skirts were long again and both men and women wore suits with shoulder pads or tailored clothing in public, with hats, gloves and starched and pressed fabrics, even at the seashore in the evening just to walk the boardwalk. Church attendance and the rate and duration of marriages were at an all-time high in this country. Sexual mores moved into the Norman Rockwell zone, and doing drugs was only for utter scumbags. It took about a decade of prosperity after WWII to start having cracks in the foundation, with the aggressive communist infiltration that had started with FDR's administration starting to become more brazen after WWII. But after the McCarthy hearings the commies and Christian-haters simply moved their nexus of operations away from government to Hollywood and the universities, where they have been more successful at taking over the culture, if not the administration of government -- until January 2009, that is.
I hope we're about hitting bottom now, but it may take another 10 to 20 years after this latest commie Admin -- assuming the Axis of Evil will permit us to survive.
And that was just after the first date.
I think PJ O’Rourke said it best- when Hillary says “it takes a villsge to raise a child” she really means that the “village” is the government and the “child” is the rest of us.
Watch “Idiocracy.”
They are also not the “right kind of guys,” it would appear.
Good women are out there, but they usually try to marry good guys.
That is the group that seeks the services of an abortionist most frequently and does a little family planing don't you know. Thus preventing the out-of-wedlock birth.
We have our own copy of it.
That is the group that seeks the services of an abortionist most frequently and does a little family planing don't you know. Thus preventing the out-of-wedlock birth.
Your statement sounded counterintuitive to me, so I looked around for statistics. I couldn't find abortion rates by education level, but found that as income levels went up, abortion rates went down. Income and education levels correlate pretty well, so it seems that more educated women are less likely to get abortions than their less-educated peers.
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