Word: unwedded
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Pregnant teenagers and unwed mothers were once virtually invisible and unmentionable. But now the hush has ended: yesterday's secret has become today's national problem. Says Associate Editor Claudia Wallis, who wrote this week's cover story: "These kids are black, white, rich, poor. They live everywhere. What they...
To understand the nature of the problem, one must look beyond statistics and examine the dramatic changes in attitudes and social mores that have swept through American culture over the past 30 years. The teenage birth rate was actually higher in 1957 than it is today, but that was an...
All this has changed. Today if a girl does not choose to abort her pregnancy (and some 45% of teenagers do), chances are she will keep the baby and raise it without the traditional blessings of marriage. "The shotgun marriage is a relic of the past," observes Mark Testa, of...
Unwed motherhood may even seem glamorous to impressionable teens. "They see Jerry Hall on TV, flinging back her hair, talking about having Mick Jagger's second [out-of-wedlock] child, and saying what a wonderful life she has," bristles Daphne Busby of Brooklyn, founder of the Sisterhood of Black Single...
But if unwed motherhood has lost much of its notoriety, premarital sex has over the same period become positively conventional. Like it or not, American adolescents are far more sexually active than they used to be. Guttmacher statistics show that the incidence of sexual intercourse among unmarried teenage women increased...