Census: More Childless Women, Smaller Family Sizes

22-08-2008

Washington DC, Aug 21, 2008 (CNA).- A
new Census Bureau report shows that more women in their 40s are
childless, while those who are having children are having fewer than
ever before. The same report, released on Monday, shows that more than
28 percent of children born in the year preceding the 2006 survey were
born to mothers who had never been married.

According
to the Census Bureau's report "Fertility of American Women: 2006," over
the last 30 years the number of women aged 40 to 44 with no children
has doubled from 10 percent to 20 percent. Women of that age group who
are mothers have an average of 1.9 children each, more than one child
fewer than women in the same age group in 1976.

The
census report used data from an annual survey of 76 million women ages
15 to 50 conducted from January through December 2006, the Associated
Press reports. The data allows a state-by-state comparison of fertility
patterns, collating statistics which could be used by state agencies to
evaluate the need for maternal care services.

About 4.2 million women participating in the survey in 2006 had had a child in the previous year.

About
35.5 percent of women who gave birth in the previous twelve months were
separated, divorced, widowed, or never married, with the never married
women comprising 28.4 percent of the overall total.

In
2006 women with graduate or professional degrees recorded the most
births of all educational levels. While women in the labor force
accounted for 57 percent of recent births, unemployed women had about
twice as many children as working women. About one quarter of all women
who had a child in the previous year were living below the poverty
level.

The census report says
second-generation Hispanic women are having fewer babies than their
foreign-born grandmothers and first-generation American mothers.
California, Nevada, Texas, Arizona, Florida, Illinois, New York, and
New Jersey had a greater percentage of foreign-born women who became
mothers in 2006. The Southeast and Southwest U.S. had a bigger share of
women in poverty who gave birth in the previous year

Andrew
Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University, said the
larger number of childless women could cause demographic problems in
the future.

"It means that 25
years from now, there'll be many elderly people who are childless and
who may not have anybody to care for them," he said, according to
LifeSiteNews.com.

Pope
Benedict XVI in a 2006 message to the Pontifical Academy of Social
Sciences commented that children are too often looked upon in terms of
their economic costs and not as gifts from God. He attributed the
decline in birthrates to this mentality, also blaming it for being
detrimental to children already born.

"It
is children and young people who are often the first to experience the
consequences of this eclipse of love and hope," the Pope said. "Often,
instead of feeling loved and cherished, they appear to be merely
tolerated."

http://www.ewtn.com/vnews/getstory.asp?number=90559