The Missing Headline: Unmarried Births Rise

My latest article on Mercator Net is here.

Horrors! The teen birth rate rises!

Thus spake the mainstream media when preliminary data from the Centres for Disease Control showed that the teen birth rate rose three per cent in 2006, the first rise since 1991. The mainstream media reacted true to form. They rounded up the usual suspects: abstinence education and those pesky Christian conservatives. If only the media had troubled to examine the whole report, though, they might have noticed a few things that didn’t fit their template of sex-education-good, abstinence-bad.
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The unmarried mothers’ birth rate rose over twice as much as the teen birth rate. But the mainstream media did not find this worthy of comment. So, let’s ask ourselves why they choose to emphasize one figure, the increase in teen births, over an increase in unmarried childbearing.

Read it all here.