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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.
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Emily Y is right to be concerned. Though I was one before unwed mothers were a rising statistic, I don't recommend becoming a single mother by choice. Obviously having social standing, a college education, and a loving husband all make a big difference in the large bore challenges of raising children: assuring a secure environment, good education, and culturally uplifting activities. (Not to mention equipping them with GPS navigators or latitude homing devices as Abby suggests.)
As women, however, we share many experiences not limited to members of "our own middle- and upper-middle-class world" that Emily B describes. Economic assumptions aside, young, poor mothers are just as motivated to do the best they can for their offspring as the moms with manicured lawns or doorman buildings, and a well-heeled background, sadly, doesn't mean we will always remember to speak lovingly to our children when they disappoint us (as they are bound to occasionally), even under the best circumstances.
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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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