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    More, Many More Unwed Mothers

    Posted Thursday, March 19, 2009 1:57 PM | By Emily Yoffe
    Hanna and Jessica, perhaps complacency that teen pregnancy rates had been successfully declining for so long, and perhaps ineffective abstinence-only education has something to do with the disturbing rise in young unwed motherhood. But my favorite theory is that such sexual behavior is culturally transmitted. While teen pregnancy rates have started to rise a little, among women ages 20 to 24 who give birth, 60 percent are having those kids of out wedlock. For a large segment of our society, it has become the normal thing to do. But if you're 22 and just had a baby, that probably means you haven't gone to college. As Kay Hymowitz has written, unwed motherhood is the greatest engine of social inequality in this country. There are actually very few Murphy Browns—college-educated professionals deciding to raise children on their own. College-educated women, as Hymowitz writes, have a life script and things follow in sequence: education, career, marriage, children. Following this order means their children will follow the same script. This has broken down for large segments of our population. There is no shame or embarrassment at out-of-wedlock birth anymore; there is often the sense this is a better way to go than getting married (as if the child's father would even entertain getting hitched) and inevitably getting divorced. The year-by-year increase in out-of-wedlock births in this country shows how self-perpetuating this is. What the statistics don't show is the suffering of children whose longing to have a father will be unmet, and who are being raised by overwhelmed mothers.
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