Hmmmm. Having children is now categorized as women successfully “meeting their fertility goals.” Doesn’t matter how you do it, it’s all about choice and personal satisfaction. SAD. -the elves
More single U.S. women over the age of 35 are having children, even as the overall birth rates for unmarried women in the United States have dropped, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday. There were 1.6 million births to unmarried women in 2013, the lowest since 2005, when there were 1.5 million, the data showed.
Running counter to the trend were middle-aged and older women having children outside of marriage. The birth rate for unmarried women between the ages of 40 to 44 increased 29 percent from 2007 to 2012 and 7 percent during that time for those aged 35 to 39, the CDC said.
“Many women are postponing births until their 30s, and the stigma of having a child outside of marriage has faded,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University who has studied the issue but was not involved with the CDC report.
Women who choose to give birth at an older age now have greater medical options for increasing fertility, said Sally Curtin, a CDC statistician and an author of the study. “There’s more out there for women to meet their fertility goals,” she said.
there are many reasons mid age women are having children out of wedlock; mainly that most appropriate aged men are interested in marrying younger women. or….if they happen to still be single in mid age, they are either commitment phobes or have a lot of toxic baggage from previous marriages. many women of a certain age will have no hope of marriage even if they want it.
easy divorce, birth control and the rise of feminism has done much damage to marriage prospects and to women in general imo.
I don’t think you mean this the way it sounds. After all, the “women of a certain age” were, only a few years earlier, the very same “younger women” the “appropriate men” would have sought to marry.
The reason these women chose to put off marriage and/or freeze their eggs is because they refused to accept the men in question were indeed “appropriate” enough.
This, in turn, was because both the men and women in question were brought up to view their opposites as commodities: the women to view men as vendors of an affluence the women had no justifiable reason to expect, and the men to view women as, well, inferior to what’s on the internet.
I view these two phenomena as two sides of a single coin.