In case you missed it: entertainer, artist, actress and fashion designer Beyonce Knowles and her husband, Jay-Z (Sean Carter) (best described as a music mogul) are expecting their first child. Good for them. Congratulations! That's where we should all leave it, but of course that doesn't feed a 'social issue".
So, how do you make a celebrity couple's very public announcement about an everyday event into a social issue? You turn the mother into the poster girl for the "wait until marriage" cause aimed at would-be-pregnant teenagers.
Great, except that reports from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention show that teen pregnancies for all races declined steadily between 1991 and 2005, jumped slightly between 2005 and 2007 and then declined again between 2007 and 2009. In other words, the general trend among 15-19 year old teenagers is to wait, at least until they are adults. The same report showed that while 40 percent of births in the U.S. in 2007 were to unwed mothers, teenage mothers accounted for less than a quarter of those births (compared to half in 1970.)
To say that single motherhood is now common is a fact, not a backlash against marriage. In truth, we only care about the marital status of the mother because most babies born to single women are "unplanned." As the CDC report highlighted, these babies are thus more likely to have "low birth weight, be preterm and die in infancy." There are several socioeconomic factors that go into this perfect storm including availability of contraceptives, prenatal care, and even post-natal care but all of these factors are allayed by marriage only if you consider that it means a more stable (read: financially sound) household.
Yes, teen birth rates in the U.S. remain up to nine times higher than in most other developed nations. Yes, teen pregnancy results in an increased socioeconomic burden. But, marriage is not a silver bullet to these ailments. (After all, divorce rates also fell between 2000 and 2009, at the same time that a higher percentage of children were being born out of wedlock.) What does this tell us?