Word: wedlock
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...elsewhere -- in itself no crime. But her selection of which parts to quote and which to leave out reveal her motives. For example, she describes an episode in which Nancy, after an angry encounter with her stepson Michael, then 16, callously told him he had been born out of wedlock to an army sergeant who had gone overseas and never returned. Writes Kelley: "Michael said he was rocked by the heartless way he received the news . . . 'I guess I expected Nancy to be more sympathetic,' he said years later...
...once too lax and too rigid. We have been more successful than is often realized in ending or alleviating certain kinds of poverty. The underclass, with its devastated family life, its single mothers and routine teenage pregnancies (among black teenagers, nearly 90% of babies are born out of wedlock), is a nightmare reproach to America. But it is also a relatively isolated phenomenon -- far more so than the poverty that festered behind the proud facades of Victorian England, for example. It requires separate, special treatment...
Predictably, out-of-wedlock pregnancies are on the rise. In response, the government has taken a practical, if not exactly approving, stance toward the problem. Only a few years ago, unmarried pregnant women were fired from their jobs and forced to have publicized abortions. Now they are allowed to get abortions confidentially...
That is open to debate. Some columnists point out that there is little one can say today that can ruin a person. Extramarital affairs, divorce, children out of wedlock are no longer utterly shocking (though they may bring harsher judgments on politicians than, say, screen stars, because indiscretions call character and judgment into question). "There is no one today who has the power of, say, Louella Parsons," observes novelist Nora Ephron. "Those people could really punish you." When Parsons revealed in 1949 that Ingrid Bergman had left her husband for director Roberto Rossellini, the scandal kept her from making movies...
Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage, the studbook of the British aristocracy, has decided to join the 20th century. Explaining that "about one in every four children in Britain is born out of wedlock," Debrett's co-editor Charles Kidd pointed out that the 2,300-page 169th edition of the tome, published last week at $205 a copy, for the first time includes the "illegitimate issue" of the titled and blue-blooded. According to Kidd, the change was requested by many people previously excluded. Said he: "Since Debrett's has everything to do with being a book of record...