Somewhere Dan Quayle is clenching his fists. Two decades after the then-vice president bemoaned single motherhood ”” calling out the sitcom Murphy Brown for having its eponymous main character choose to have a child on her own ”” the latest data on U.S. births show that a full 40% of babies are now born to unmarried mothers. (Read about the Quayle/Murphy Brown controversy here.)
The findings, released Wednesday by the National Center for Health Statistics and covering the 2007 calendar year, also revealed a general increase in fertility rates across nearly every age category. That rise included teen birth rates, which jumped 4% between 2005 and 2007, after a startling 45% decline from 1991 to 2005.
This turnaround of what had been an enormous public health advance has policy makers worried ”” and culture warriors pointing fingers. Within a half hour of the data release on Wednesday, the National Abstinence Education Association released a statement calling for greater use of abstinence ”” only sex education programs in public schools. At the same time, supporters of so-called comprehensive sex education, like columnist Bonnie Erbe at U.S. News & World Report, said abstinence education is the problem; they blamed the rising teen birth rate on the fact that federal funding for sex education over the past eight years has been restricted to programs that encourage kids to postpone sex until marriage.
yep, Dan Quayle was right, there have been many articles to that effect:
http://www.google.com/search?q=“dan+quayle+was+right”&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls;=
this article dovetails with the one about homework – it’s necessary now because these kids, many from single parent homes, don’t come to school in any way equipped to learn, rather the teachers spin their wheels disciplining them…..
Yes, Dan Quayle was right about single motherhood…
Richard Nixon was right about enemies within our borders….
Joe McCarthy was right about the same….
So many are right and so few listen because our education system has failed us. “40% of babies are now born to unmarried mothers” is just one more evidence that education has failed. We desperately need a wall of separation between education and state.
Don
And those unwed mothers are more apt to turn to the state for resources and support – a way to increase government reach, wouldn’t you say?
“Some schools are cutting back on homework” This will help “…the Boom in Adult Single Motherhood” continue because kids will have more time to have sex and make babies instead of doing homework.
“Stigma” is only half the battle. The other half is marriage itself. You learn as a child how to be married by living in intact families.
If you look at the statistics themselves, it is clear that the bulk of the rise in single motherhood is coming from women in their twenties or above who presumably have other sources of information than high school sex education courses. The median age of women giving birth has not been falling, but is still about 25, as it has been for years. These women (and many of the teenagers as well) are not suffering “accidents,” but are making a deliberate choice to have children while unmarried.
The bigger underlying story, therefore, is the increasing number of persons (males necessarily as well as females) who are not getting married or who are delaying marriage. The majority of women entering into a first marriage in the USA these days are over 25, while men have a median age of 27. When the average age at marriage is roughly equal to the average age of giving birth, the rate of babies born outside wedlock is going to be pretty high. This isn’t just an American phenomenon—average ages at first marriage are even higher in Australia and much of Europe. The last time I checked, over 80% of first-born children in Iceland were born to single mothers.
It is not clear that the generalizations (illegitimate children are likely going to end up on welfare, grow up to be delinquents, etc.) that we once could apply to unwanted and stigmatized children born out of wedlock to a teenaged dropout mom are as applicable to children born to professional women who have made a deliberate choice for parenthood. There is a different dynamic at work. The stereotypes may apply, but we can’t take it for granted.
Unfortunately, we are in the midst of a huge social experiment whose results will not be seen for many years.