Walk Pico Blvd near Robertson Blvd on Shabbat and you’ll see some Orthodox women who look about 16 pushing baby carriages.
These are Orthodox girls around 18 years of age who’ve married young and started having kids.
In my experience, these women (and couples) tend to be formidably competent and mature beyond their years.
Many will say they are too immature to raise kids, but Dennis Prager argues that getting married and having kids in your late teens is probably the fastest way to grow up.
Dennis says it is far better to have kids raised by married teens than by single mothers.
The latest figures show that 40% of new births are to unmarried mothers. Prager said that what was as important as the statistic was the AP refusing to list this as something bad.
ATLANTA (AP) – More babies were born in the United States in 2007 than any year in the nation’s history, topping the peak during the baby boom 50 years earlier, federal researchers reported Wednesday.
There is both good and bad news from the more than 4.3 million births:
_The U.S. population is more than replacing itself, a healthy trend.
_However, the teen birth rate was up for the second year in a row.
The birth rate rose slightly for women of all ages, and births to unwed mothers reached an all-time high of about 40 percent, continuing a trend begun years ago. More than three-quarters of these women were 20 or older.
For a variety of reasons, it’s become more acceptable for women to have babies without a husband, said Duke University’s S. Philip Morgan, a leading fertility researcher.
Even happy couples may be living together without getting married, experts say. And more women—especially those in their 30s and 40s—are choosing to have children despite their single status.
The new numbers indicate the nation is experiencing a baby boomlet with fertility rates higher in every racial group. On average, a U.S. woman has 2.1 babies in her lifetime. The highest fertility rates were among Hispanics.
