The XX Factor: What women really think.

Fertile and Fifteen

Back at Jessica and Bonnie: To me the saddest part of that NYT slideshow interview with Elizabeth Cousins, the 16-year-old mother in Brooklyn, was the moment when she explained that she'd thought about abortion, but reconsidered because "people" told her that this might be her only chance to be a mother. It's one thing to decide against abortion because you have a deep moral repugnance for the practice. But how awful to bear a child at 15 (her daughter is 19 months old now) because your ignorant teenage friends tell you something that patently wrong. Assuming she has regular cycles and normal fertility, Elizabeth will have at least 300 more chances to get pregnant in her lifetime. There are plenty of things she will need to worry about in life, but having a baby as infertility insurance at age 15 creates a hell of a lot more problems than it solves.

Unwed Mothers, Unpacked

Emily Y, you're right about the large number of women who are having babies outside of marriage. In 1960, 5 percent of kids were born to unmarried mothers. Now the rate is about 40 percent. That is certainly a broad cultural shift, over a couple of generations. But unmarried doesn't necessarily mean single as in all by yourself. University of Michigan sociologist Pamela Smock has shown that as many as half of unmarried mothers live with the fathers of their children when those kids are born. That doesn't mean those relationships are long-term and stable—compared with marriage, they are less so. But the data paint a different picture, I think, than the one we usually see when we think single mom.

As for whether to recommend single motherhood by choice, Bonnie, this one to me is part of what I was puzzling over the other day, about audience. Most unmarried mothers are low-income and young and haven't gone to college. They're the people for whom unwed motherhood is an engine of social inequality, as Emily aptly put it. That's the main story, in terms of the numbers, and so we should have our eye on it. But then there is the much smaller—but growing much more rapidly—group of Murphy Browns: single mother by choice who have gone to college, make good money, and for one reason or another don't find husbands but in their 30s decide to have kids anyway. When I hung out with some of those moms for a magazine piece earlier this year, I was struck by their autonomy. (Their kids were adopted or sperm babies, so no dads in the picture.) I'm not suggesting we design policy around this much smaller group. But the framework for their choices is simply different from the framework of a 20-year-old who has no clear way to support herself and her kid. Whether growing up without a father, to get back to that point you raised Emily, is just as difficult no matter what other resources your family has—that's a hard and big question.

Eight Is Great

I can’t tear myself away from the story of Nadya Suleman, who recently added octuplets to her family of six small kids, without a job, home, or spouse. She lives with her mother in a three-bedroom home, although it looks like her rent free days are soon to be over. Yet in a series of interviews with NBC’s Ann Curry, the 33-year-old Nadya sounds like she’s got it all figured out: She’s just going to finish her degree and get a job and move her 14 children into a new house. Good thing the economy is booming.

Suleman told Curry—and Nancy Gibbs at Time seems to agree—that we are judging her differently from other parents of multiples (who get showered with Pampers and phone calls from the president) merely because she isn’t married. Are they right? Noreen, you posted about free-floating squeamishness about big families, but are we even nastier when there is no dad? Suleman is not on welfare (she is collecting workers compensation) and she really does appear to adore her kids. So is she really all that different from another famous baby-collector, Angelina Jolie, to whom she bears—by the way—a freakish resemblance?