Unwed motherhood rises sharply

posted at 1:47 pm on May 14, 2009 by Pundette
[ Culture ]   

The gyre widens. Marriage as a pre-requisite to parenthood is going out of style. The number of US babies born out of wedlock has risen sharply, to almost forty per cent. “It’s been a huge increase — a dramatic increase,” says Stephanie Ventura of the National Center for Health Statistics, and it’s not being driven by a rise in teenage motherhood.

Some experts said the trend represents a positive change for many women, allowing them to avoid becoming social outcasts, being forced to give up their babies for adoption or having abortions, and letting them raise children in nontraditional families.

“Women can have children on their own, and it’s not going to destroy your employment, and it’s not going to mean that you’ll be made a pariah by the community,” Hertz said. “It’s much more socially acceptable.”

Maybe unmarried moms can now live discrimination-, guilt-, and stigma-free lives, but it isn’t necessarily in their best interest:

. . . marriage is an unbelievably efficient arrangement and the best wealth-creating institution there is. Married people earn more, save more and build more wealth compared with people who are single or cohabiting. (Say what you will about the benefits of cohabitation, it’s a categorically less stable arrangement, far more prone to division than marriage.) We can combine incomes while reducing expenses such as food, child care, electricity, gas and water usage.

And the benefits are not just material: studies show that married people are happier, healthier, and more fulfilled.

Last but not least, there’s the welfare of the children:

But others said the trend is disturbing because children who grow up without stable, two-parent families tend not to fare as well in many ways.

“I look at this and say, maybe this trend is what young adults want or stumble into, but it’s not in the best interest of children,” said Sarah Brown, chief executive of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

This message, that children need their fathers and will suffer without them, has long been a politically loaded one, and messengers from Dan Quayle to Ann Coulter have been villified for it. That the research bears them out matters little.

*Updated: Charles Murray writes on how illegitimacy among white women breaks down by class:

Today, the illegitimacy ratio for non-Latino whites is 28 percent. How do the classes break down now? As it happens, I’ve spent the last few weeks exploring that question. I’m not done, and want to save that discussion for a formal presentation in any case, but here are some tentative estimates: The illegitimacy ratio for the white underclass is probably now in the region of 70 percent. I think that the proportion for the white working class may be above 40 percent. The white middle class is approaching 20 percent—a scarily high figure when you think about all the ways that the middle class has been the spine of the nation.

The white overclass? They’re still living in the 1950s—their ratio is probably about 4 or 5 percent tops.

The center isn’t holding.

Related posts:
Maybe you should get married
Predictors of divorce

Bonus bad news: Sweden okays abortions of babies because of their sex.

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