It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.
The shift is affecting children’s lives. Researchers have consistently found that children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems.
The recent rise in single motherhood has set off few alarms, unlike in past eras. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a top Labor Department official and later a United States senator from New York, reported in 1965 that a quarter of black children were born outside marriage — and warned of a “tangle of pathology”— he set off a bitter debate.
By the mid-1990s, such figures looked quaint: a third of Americans were born outside marriage. Congress, largely blaming welfare, imposed tough restrictions. Now the figure is 41 percent — and 53 percent for children born to women under 30, according to Child Trends, which analyzed 2009 data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
TVNL Comment: When media personalities use the term "baby daddy", as if it were a legitimate (and proper english) social norm what do you expect? Turn on any trash talk show (the miday Jerry Springer light shows) and whatch the idiotic term "baby dady" being used and the topic of having babies discussed like it was no big deal. The media has made this a socially acceptable reality...because the importance of birth control and especially abortion can not be emphasised in any way...thanks to good the old conservitive loonies!