It's hard to tell what the hot slow jam was in 2007, but whatever it was, it resulted in a nationwide baby boom for that year.

Yes, our friends at the National Center for Health Statistics say in the busy latter half of this decade, we Americans have managed to find just enough time to get our collective freak on and push the number of lil' mans and lil' mamis to 4.31 million, breaking the 1957 record. ...


This all comes from increased fertility among women in all general childbearing-age categories, from their twenties to their forties. Teenagers represented 23 percent of all births. Here's the interesting thing though: The number of births to unmarried mothers jumped to 40 percent across the board.

Looks like the age of pointing gossipy fingers and keeping family secrets is over. Ain't no shame in your game if you choose to carry a child to term, married or not.

We've entered an age where people just don't feel the same way about the nuclear family as they once did. But despite every blathering right-wing nut out there who seems hell-bent on deriding any woman who doesn't follow antiquated patriarchal rules of family planning, people are finding that it's cool if your kid comes before the ring. Quite literally, the word bastard has become as passe as the word lousy.

Not that I'm advocating turning away from the traditional nuclear family. On the contrary, there's nothing I enjoy more than being around the prototype Cosby-style family -- but that is not the norm anymore, and I'm okay with that. I'm just saying that families come in all shapes, sizes and colors and one family situation is not necessarily better than another. Be it single mom, single dad, grandparent-grandchildren, same-sex, sibling-headed, adoptive, common law, Brangelina-style or the old-fashioned mommy-daddy-kids-puppy situation, the focus should be on raising well-adjusted kids and providing a supportive, functional setting for them.

Here in the black community the one kind of nontraditional family that has gotten a bad rap for far too long is unmarried black women giving birth.

In fact, for the past few years, black women have been derided way too much for having an out-of-wedlock birthrate of 70 percent, but that's a stat that I always hated because it's loaded. Many conservative types, just for the sole purpose of making sistas look like unspayed cats, argue that black women just go around dropping litters all over the 'hood. But nothing could be further from the truth. The 70 percent rate represents actual live births. But the number of those births have been steadily decreasing among black women since at least the '60s.

In 1960, there was a fertility rate of 153.5 black babies per 1,000 women (meaning children born to women aged 15-44), according to this NCHS table. By 1988, that number had tapered off to 82.6 per 1,000, and by 2002, it was down to 65.9 per 1,000. In 2005, it increased slightly to 67.2 per 1,000 (see figure 3 in this link).

So the 70 percent out of wedlock represents the number that are actually born despite the overall birth decrease. In other words, sistas are having far fewer babies, and the ones having them are in large part the ones who aren't married. What this all really means is that black women are having an increasing amount of trouble finding suitable men to start families with -- and many of those who do become pregnant are choosing, for their own reasons, to have their kids as a solo act.

It should be noted that there are historic trends of black male incarceration rates and unemployment rates in the same period, which could possibly explain some of this phenomenon. Between 1979 and 1990 alone the number of blacks as a percentage of all those locked up in state or federal facilities increased from 39 to 53 percent.

Enough numbers, facts and figures. After all, I'm not trying to convince you that correlation is equal to causation, but it certainly explains a hell of a lot. In this case, it explains the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks that so many like to complain about without doing their homework.

Look, my whole point is that using a higher unmarried birthrate, whatever the ethnic background, to scandalize the nation is fallacious and does not reflect that children can have loving families with great male and female role models if people (especially right-wing politicians and religious zealots) would stop trying to define what a family is supposed to be.