It’s kind of neat that the AP story the New York Times ran yesterday about the pregnancy of Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), who will become just the fifth woman to give birth while serving in Congress, pays no heed to the timeline of when, exactly, she got pregnant.

Rogers married in August and her baby is due in May. In the old days, the possibility that a conservative Congresswoman had gotten pregnant before she was married might have been a scandal. But now it’s widely recognized that the circumstances are none of our business and the AP treats it as such.

Sometimes you can tell norms are changing as much by what’s not included in news coverage as by what is.

PS: Why does another version of the AP story refer to the pregnancy as a “blessed event”? Isn’t that kind of explicitly religious language inappropriate for a wire story?