The Spiritual Quest of Mother’s Day
Chuck Donovan /
Mother’s Day is upon us and some media outlets will no doubt continue their pattern of going out of their way to find offbeat maternity stories. Much of the cynical press finds faithful, monogamous and married parenting patently boring – and prefers to focus instead on the socially irresponsible, the technologically avant-garde , or the politically cheeky.
This is tragic, given the amount of very intriguing and important news about mothers and families, especially the trend that finds the United States now approaching current European levels of out-of-wedlock childbearing. In news that was grossly under-reported last month, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control released preliminary numbers for 2008 that showed a record number of U.S. babies – 1.72 million, or 40.6 percent – were born out of wedlock. The most significant increases came for unmarried women in their 20s and early 30s and not for teenagers, for whom the out-of-wedlock rate is stable or declining.