
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 7, 1995                   TAG: 9506070072
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

SINGLE WOMEN HAVING MORE BABIES THAN EVER

The birth rate for unmarried women has surged since 1980, with the rate for white women nearly doubling. The overall rate is up more than 50 percent, the government says.

Teen-agers, who once accounted for half the unwed births, bore fewer than one-third of these 1.2 million babies in 1992, the National Center for Health Statistics said Tuesday. The highest rate was for women in their early 20s.

When Murphy Brown, the glamorous anchorwoman on a television situation comedy, had a child out of wedlock three seasons ago, then-Vice President Dan Quayle accused the show of glamorizing illegitimacy and undermining values.

But career women who elect to have babies without husbands are still relatively rare.

More often, unwed mothers are single women in their late teens or early 20s with lower incomes and less education than other mothers, said Stephanie Ventura, a government demographer who prepared the report.

``Childbearing by these women is not really a Murphy Brown situation,'' Ventura said.

The rising out-of-wedlock birth rates point to ``a tremendous decline in the stigma'' that society once attached to such births, Ventura said.

Schools that once expelled pregnant girls and sent them off to homes for unwed mothers now have day-care programs for the students' offspring, she noted.

The out-of-wedlock birth rates rose sharply for women 20 and older.

The highest rates were among women ages 20-24 (68.5 births per 1,000), followed by women ages 18-19 (67.3) and women 25-29 (56.5). The rate for women ages 30-34 was 37.9; for teen-agers 15-17, it was 30.4.

Overall, the National Center for Health Statistics said, the unmarried birth rate rose 54 percent from 1980 to 1992. There were 29.4 births per 1,000 unmarried women age 15-44 in 1980, and 45.2 births per 1,000 in both 1991 and 1992.

The out-of-wedlock birth rates for decades has been much higher among black women than white women, and that still holds true. But the gap is closing.

The birth rate for unmarried black women was seven times the white rate in 1970 and four times the white rate in 1980.

by CNB