Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 31, 1995 TAG: 9510310104
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Thirty percent of births in the United States in 1993 were to unwed mothers - an almost eightfold increase since 1940 - the report found. But the majority of these unmarried mothers were not teen-agers or minorities.
Sixty percent of births outside marriage in 1993 were to white women, and 70 percent were to women older than 20. (Still, because 72 percent of all teen-agers who have babies are unmarried, single motherhood remained disproportionately high for teen-agers.)
The steep rise in unwed childbearing is ``not a teen problem, not a minority problem and not a poverty problem. We are looking at something societywide. We have to think much bigger,'' said demographer Kristin A. Moore, author of the report's executive summary.
She said the findings also have important implications for the supposedly cherished institution of marriage. Women ``are not really having more kids,'' Moore, executive director of Washington-based Child Trends Inc., said. ``They are having kids without getting married.''
For many Americans, he said, ``economic and social circumstances have made marriage less attractive, less necessary or less feasible.''
The survey also showed that:
Poorly educated and less-affluent men are less likely to marry, but not necessarily less likely to have children. For men and women, higher wages, higher levels of education and better economic opportunities are related to lower rates of nonmarital childbearing and higher levels of marriage.
``Shotgun weddings'' are a thing of the past. Today, unmarried couples experiencing a pregnancy are much less likely to marry than 25 or 30 years ago. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the proportion of nonmarital conceptions in which the parents married before the child was born plummeted from 31 percent to 8 percent among blacks, from 33 percent to 23 percent among Latinos, and from 61 percent to 34 percent among whites.
The risk zone for unmarried pregnancies has expanded substantially over the past few decades as Americans marry later, divorce more frequently and are more likely to engage in nonmarital sex. Among married women born between 1954 and 1963, 82 percent had sex before they were married, compared with 65 percent among women born a decade earlier.
Unmarried women who are sexually active are less likely than married women to use contraceptives. Among sexually active women in 1988, 17 percent of never-married women and 11 percent of previously married women were not using contraception, compared with 5 percent of currently married women.
Welfare is not a significant contributor to recent increases in out-of-wedlock childbearing. Evidence linking welfare benefits with increases in nonmarital births is inconsistent - and when a link is found, it tends to be small.
The report did reaffirm data suggesting that out-of-wedlock childbearing has negative consequences for children, mothers and taxpayers.
by CNB