Why Are Unwed Women in U.S. Are Having Fewer Babies?

Brandi
Zadrozny of The Daily Beast reports an interesting
trend that most people will find a positive one. The rate of
children born to single women has declined:

A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
shows the most recent upward trend, begun in 2002, seems to have
reversed, in the steepest decline ever recorded, dropping 14
percent from its 2007 peak, to 44.8 per 1,000 women of childbearing
age (15-44). The number of births to unwed mothers also dropped 7
percent, to approximately 1.6 million, from 2012 to 2013. Mostly
women under 30 years old drove the declines. Hispanic and black
women saw the biggest drops.

Zadrozny notes that the overall birth rate has fallen so it
kinda/sorta makes sense that the rate for unwed women would also
drop (though not necessarily, as different forces could be at
work). Why are women having fewer kids, especially in the U.S. and
the “developed world”? Scroll down for the basic answer. (Spoiler
alert: Because they can.)

The whole article is worth reading and packed with some
interesting charts, including this one, which shows that more kids
born to unwed mothers are coming home to houses with two
parents:

As Zadrozny writes, “Almost three in five births to unwed women
are to women who are cohabitating with a partner. In 2002 and the
years 2006-10, the percentage of children born to cohabiting
parents rose from 41 percent to 58 percent.”

Cohabitating households are not as stable as
married ones, but they also have far more resources than true
single-parent households. And Zadrozny links to a study showing
that cohabitating fathers are as involved in child-rearing as
married ones. She also quotes a researcher who argues:

“Four in 10 births are outside of marriage….That’s not going
to reverse in a big way. It hasn’t gone down even as the nonmarital
birth rates have. I think this is the family formation of the
future and so there needs to be approaches to improving well-being
in these types of families.”

I think that’s probably right: Family structures have always
been subject to changes that can’t be reeled back to whatever
preferred golden-age you want. It’s an interesting question to ask
what are the best ways to adapt to new forms of social
organization.

I reviewed Jonathan Last’s interesting What to Expect When
No One’s Expecting, which charts a global decline in birth
rates, for BookForum. The short answer for why women are
having fewer babies: modernity. Read all about
it.

And I talked about the unacknowledged constant change in family
structure for Reason back in 1997. A snippet:

Anyone who even occasionally tunes into television and radio
talk shows, skims a newspaper editorial page or an opinion
magazine, or browses the nonfiction aisles at a bookstore is
familiar with some variation on the following theme: “The family,
in its old sense…is disappearing from our land, and not only our
free institutions are threatened but the very existence of our
society is endangered.” This formulation of the problems facing
“the family” is interesting for at least three reasons. First, as
is often the case in such discussions, it
invokes the family as a wholly self-evident,
unitary phenomenon with no possible variation. Second, it captures
the lure of traditional social arrangements and articulates the
centrality of the family to society at large. Third, the statement
is well over a century old, having originally appeared in an 1859
issue of the Boston Quarterly Review. That it
sounds so current is worth pausing over.