Nearly 40 percent of babies born in the United States in 2007 were delivered by unwed mothers, according to data released last month by the National Center for Health Statistics. The 1.7 million out-of-wedlock births, of 4.3 million total births, marked a more than 25 percent jump from five years before.
Evidently, there are a lot of people having sex without marraige. And these statistics only include the ones who got pregnant and gave birth. When you include the ones that didn't, the number would go up tremendously. Is abstinence realistic? Not according to these numbers.
Nor do these statistics mean that there is more sex outside of marraige today than there was 20, 30, 40, or 50 years ago. In the past, a pregnant woman and the father of the baby would have been forced into a marraige before she started showing her pregnancy, just so no one would know that they had engaged in premarital sex.
