Recently the Washington Post published an article about a federal report which states that the number of babies being born to single women in this country has sharply increased. This is occurring mainly among women in their 20s and 30s.
More than 1.7 million babies were born to single women in 2007; this is a 26 percent increase from 2002, and it is more than double the number in 1980, according to a report issued by the National Center for Health Statistics. Therefore single women accounted for 39.7 percent of all births in the U.S. in 2007. To look at it another way, this means four out of every 10 newborns. This is an incredible increase, and very amazing when you think about it.
The report did not offer reasons as to the rise of this group of newborns, but Stephanie Ventura, who led the analysis of birth certificate data said, (along with other experts), that the trend is a result of the decrease of social stigma associated with unmarried mothers, an increase in couples delaying marriage, and a growing number of financially independent women who are older, and single women who make the decision to have children on their own.
Remember Republican Sarah Palin's unmarried pregnant teenage daughter and how she was paraded in public? Maybe that was a sign of the times.