Births to Unmarried U.S. Women Set Record
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By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID Posted: 10/28/05 - 01:51:25 pm CDT
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WASHINGTON - Nearly 1.5 million babies, a record, were born to unmarried women in the United States last year, the government reported Friday. And it isn't just teenagers any more.
"People have the impression that teens and unmarried mothers are synonymous," said Stephanie Ventura of the National Center for Health Statistics.
But last year teens accounted for just 24 percent of unwed births, down from 50 percent in 1970, she commented.
The increases in unmarried births have been among women in their 20s, she said, particularly those 25 to 29.
Many of the women in that age group are living with partners but still count as unmarried mothers if they haven't formally married, Ventura noted.
The 20s are the prime childbearing years, regardless of whether the mother is married or not, she said.
Among teens, more than 80 percent of mothers were unmarried.
There were 1,470,152 babies born to single women in 2004, 35.7 percent of all births in the country, NCHS said. That was up from 1,415,995 a year earlier.
Births to older women continued to increase, Brady Hamilton of NCHS pointed out, reflecting choices these women are making in terms of careers and having families.
The birth rate for women aged 35 to 39 increased 4 percent from 2003 to 2004. It was up 3 percent for women aged 40 to 44 and 9 percent for those 45 to 49.
Other findings of the report included:
_There was a total of 4,115,590 births in the country in 2004, up from 4,089,950 in 2003.
_Births to whites declined by nearly 18,000 while Hispanics were up 32,000, there was an increase of more than 8,000 in births to Asians and a rise of just 72 births among black women.
_The total birth rate was 14.0 per 1,000 women, down from 14.1 in 2003.
_The birth rate for women aged 15 to 19 was 41.2 per 1,000, down from 41.6 in 2003 and a record low. The teen birth rate was 61.8 in 1991 and has been declining since.
On the Net:
National Center for Health Statistics: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs
A service of the Associated Press(AP)
Friday, October 28, 2005
Friday, October 21, 2005
Who is God in the Bible?
Jesus and Yahweh: The names Divine. Harold Bloom, literary critic of longstanding reputation, has entered again into an area of some rhetorical density.
Bloom has ventured to look at the books of the bible and to examine the interrelationships existing among: Yahweh (the God the Tanakh); Jesus (the son of Mary and Joseph); and Jesus Christ (the Son of God).
Half way through his book, Bloom sets out, for me, the thesis of his work.
“ … ‘Jesus’ in my title primarily means Jesus-the-Christ, a theological God. Yahweh, in his earlier and definitive career, is not at all a theological God, but is human, all-too-human, and behaves rather unpleasantly. Christianity transforms Jesus of Nazareth, a historical person about whom we possess only a few verifiable facts, into a polytheistic multiplicity that replaces the uncannily menacing Yahweh with a very different God the Father, whose Son is the Christ or risen Messiah. Both of these divinities are shadowed by a ghostly Paraclete (Comforter) named the Holy Spirit, while Miriam, the mother of the historical Yeshua or Jesus, lingers nearby under the designation of ‘The Virgin Mary’…”
P. 111
Bloom has ventured to look at the books of the bible and to examine the interrelationships existing among: Yahweh (the God the Tanakh); Jesus (the son of Mary and Joseph); and Jesus Christ (the Son of God).
Half way through his book, Bloom sets out, for me, the thesis of his work.
“ … ‘Jesus’ in my title primarily means Jesus-the-Christ, a theological God. Yahweh, in his earlier and definitive career, is not at all a theological God, but is human, all-too-human, and behaves rather unpleasantly. Christianity transforms Jesus of Nazareth, a historical person about whom we possess only a few verifiable facts, into a polytheistic multiplicity that replaces the uncannily menacing Yahweh with a very different God the Father, whose Son is the Christ or risen Messiah. Both of these divinities are shadowed by a ghostly Paraclete (Comforter) named the Holy Spirit, while Miriam, the mother of the historical Yeshua or Jesus, lingers nearby under the designation of ‘The Virgin Mary’…”
P. 111
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
You Sit Down to Dinner and Life As You Know It Ends
Joan Didion is an author of long standing acclaim. Her long career as a writer includes five novels and several books in the nonfiction genre. Her essays have been published in many journals.
She writes now, in autobiographical mode, of the extent and reality of sudden calamity in her life. In December 2003, her daughter became seriously ill. Didion and her husband became caregivers for their adult daughter who was being treated for a critical condition of unknown origin. Late on the night of December 30, 2003, her husband suffered a massive heart attack and died nearly instantly while at supper.
In this chronicle of those interwoven tragic events, ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’, Didion writes of the emotions and the memories and the near impossibility of understanding grief.
Her theme seems to be expressed as follows.
“ … Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. …
Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself…” pp. 188, 189
And Didion repeats her catch phrase throughout the book, “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends…”
She writes now, in autobiographical mode, of the extent and reality of sudden calamity in her life. In December 2003, her daughter became seriously ill. Didion and her husband became caregivers for their adult daughter who was being treated for a critical condition of unknown origin. Late on the night of December 30, 2003, her husband suffered a massive heart attack and died nearly instantly while at supper.
In this chronicle of those interwoven tragic events, ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’, Didion writes of the emotions and the memories and the near impossibility of understanding grief.
Her theme seems to be expressed as follows.
“ … Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. …
Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself…” pp. 188, 189
And Didion repeats her catch phrase throughout the book, “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends…”
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
Changing Attitudes Among Young Adults
The young adult population views sexual activity and its consequences very differently today than 60 years ago.
A report in the recent Review of Psychology compared attitudes in 1943 versus today.
The abstract for the paper follows
Changes in Young People's Sexual Behavior and Attitudes, 1943-1999: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis.
Wells, Brooke E.; Twenge, Jean M. Abstract
Article abstract: Hide abstract
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A cross-temporal meta-analysis of 530 studies (N = 269,649) showed that young people's sexual attitudes and behavior changed substantially between 1943 and 1999, with the largest shifts occurring among girls and young women. Both young men and women became more sexually active over time, as measured by age at first intercourse (decreasing from 19 to 15 years among young women) and percentage sexually active (increasing from 13% to 47% among young women). Attitudes toward premarital intercourse became more lenient, with approval increasing from 12% to 73% among young women and from 40% to 79% among young men. Feelings of sexual guilt decreased. The correlation between attitudes and behaviors was stronger among young women. These data support theories positing that culture has a larger effect on women's sexuality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2005 APA, all rights reserved)
A report in the recent Review of Psychology compared attitudes in 1943 versus today.
The abstract for the paper follows
Changes in Young People's Sexual Behavior and Attitudes, 1943-1999: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis.
Wells, Brooke E.; Twenge, Jean M. Abstract
Article abstract: Hide abstract
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A cross-temporal meta-analysis of 530 studies (N = 269,649) showed that young people's sexual attitudes and behavior changed substantially between 1943 and 1999, with the largest shifts occurring among girls and young women. Both young men and women became more sexually active over time, as measured by age at first intercourse (decreasing from 19 to 15 years among young women) and percentage sexually active (increasing from 13% to 47% among young women). Attitudes toward premarital intercourse became more lenient, with approval increasing from 12% to 73% among young women and from 40% to 79% among young men. Feelings of sexual guilt decreased. The correlation between attitudes and behaviors was stronger among young women. These data support theories positing that culture has a larger effect on women's sexuality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2005 APA, all rights reserved)
Monday, October 03, 2005
Coping with chronic illness and Terminal Disease
The Anatomy of Hope – Jerome Groopman, M.D., holds the Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and is the chief of experimental medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
His previous books were: ‘The Measure of Our Days’ and ‘Second Opinions’.
Groopman writes from a long career in research and patient care and out of a personal background of faith and courage.
After years of treating patients and enduring his own afflictions, Groopman sought to understand more about the emotional and physical interplay in coping with pathology.
This book takes the reader beyond the ordinary.
What is hope for the terminally ill patient?
Groopman says that “…I am searching for hope. Hope, I have come to believe, is as vital to our lives as the very oxygen that we breathe...” p. 208
Further, he says that “… Each disease is uncertain in its outcome, and within that uncertainty, we find real hope, because a tumor has not always read the textbook, and a treatment can have an unexpectedly dramatic impact. This is the great paradox of true hope: Because nothing is absolutely determined, there is not only reason to fear but also reason to hope. And we must find ways to bridle fear and give greater rein to hope…” p. 210
“ … I see hope as the very heart of healing…” p. 212
His previous books were: ‘The Measure of Our Days’ and ‘Second Opinions’.
Groopman writes from a long career in research and patient care and out of a personal background of faith and courage.
After years of treating patients and enduring his own afflictions, Groopman sought to understand more about the emotional and physical interplay in coping with pathology.
This book takes the reader beyond the ordinary.
What is hope for the terminally ill patient?
Groopman says that “…I am searching for hope. Hope, I have come to believe, is as vital to our lives as the very oxygen that we breathe...” p. 208
Further, he says that “… Each disease is uncertain in its outcome, and within that uncertainty, we find real hope, because a tumor has not always read the textbook, and a treatment can have an unexpectedly dramatic impact. This is the great paradox of true hope: Because nothing is absolutely determined, there is not only reason to fear but also reason to hope. And we must find ways to bridle fear and give greater rein to hope…” p. 210
“ … I see hope as the very heart of healing…” p. 212
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