USA Today features an article about soaring unwed motherhood:
Using U.S. Census data and the responses from a telephone survey of 2,020 adults conducted last spring, Feb. 16-March 14 Pew reports show that the rate of non-marital childbearing has ballooned to 36.8% of all births in 2005, from 5.3% in 1960. As recently as the early 1990s, only about a third of these non-marital births were to cohabiting women; now it's about half of all out-of-wedlock births. Nearly half of adults (47%) in their 30s and 40s have lived in a cohabiting relationship; among those ages 30-49, about one-third have.
It isn't just unwed women with the father not in the picture, nor is it just minority populations (which often get the most press for these stunning figures):
In the past, "in about two-thirds of all births to unmarried women, the mother was truly single and there was no man in the picture," he says. "Now, about half the women who have a child out-of-wedlock are living with a man at the birth."
Teenage unwed mothers, who were often racial and ethnic minorities, made up most non-marital births in earlier decades. Today, experts say, it is white women in their 20s and 30s, who often live with the baby's father. The Pew study reports that the percentage of births to unmarried white mothers rose from 2.3% in 1960 to 35.8% in 2004.
These situations not only rob mothers of the stability and assurance that marriage brings, it robs the vulnerable, developing children of the same. Children deserve better than this from us.
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