According to a new report released this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. birth rate hit an all-time low in 2011 with births to unmarried women still above the 40 percent mark.

CNSNews.com is reporting that there were 45,793 fewer births in the U.S. than in 2010, which dropped the general fertility rate from 64.1 births per 100,000 women in 2010 to 63.2 per 100,000 in 2011. This represents the lowest birth rate ever reported in the United States.

The report also found that 40.7 percent of births in 2011 were to unmarried women, which is actually a slight decrease from 40.8 in 2010. In 2011, there were 1,606,087 babies born to unmarried women and 2,347,506 were born to married women.

This slight decrease is hardly reassuring when we consider that in 1965, 93 percent of all American births were to married women. By 1970, 11 percent of births were to unwed mothers and by 1990, this number leaped to 28 percent.

There were some bright spots in the report however with the birth rate for women age 35-39 increasing from 45.9 per 100,000 women to 47.2. Among women age 40-44, the birth rate rose from 10.2 to 10.3.

Experts have given a variety of reasons why the birth rate is dropping and unmarried births are rising with most believing the sluggish economy is convincing couples not to conceive and may be delaying the marriage plans of younger women. However, the steady increase in the number of births to unmarried women points to a much more serious problem such as the moral malaise that has been gripping our nation for the last 40 years.

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