Virginia

The state of Virginia is named in honor of Queen Elizabeth I, the “Virgin Queen” of England. It is also known, along with Ohio, as the Mother of Presidents (Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Harrison, Taylor, Tyler, and Wilson) and the Mother of States, having given “birth” to eight U.S. states from her original territory (Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, West Virginia, and Wisconsin). With a land mass of 39,594 square miles, Virginia's topography ranges from coastal beaches to the Blue Ridge Mountains. The early inhabitants of Virginia include three aboriginal groups distinguished from one another by language: the Algonquian, Sioun, and Iroguoian. Although no women were among the first settlers of Jamestown in 1607, the birth of Virginia Dare on August 18, 1587 in the short-lived Roanoke Colony is often listed as the first European birth in the new world. Also, the first baby to be born as a result of in vitro fertilization in the United States, Elizabeth Jordan Carr, was conceived at the Jones Institute in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1981.

Today, according to Kids Count, a state-by-state study of the welfare of American children, Virginia is slipping in four areas of mother and child well-being: percentage of low-birth weight babies, infant mortality rate, percentage of children living in families where no parent has full-time employment, and percentage of children in single-parent families. Also of concern is that Virginia ranks in the bottom half of states in two categories: infant mortality and low-birthweight babies. Improvement in these areas has become the focus of several statewide initiatives.

Approximately 104,555 infants are born each year in Virginia, and more than 15 percent of those children are born to teen mothers with less than a twelfth grade education. Although the teen birth rate has improved in recent years, 34 percent of Virginia's children are born to single mothers, with 13 percent of all Virginia's children subsisting below the poverty level. In addition, one in five children under age 18 now lives in foster care in Virginia, with roughly 600 or more children aging out of the system each year without finding a permanent family.