Emily Bazelon writes at the NY Times:
. . . IN 1960, UNMARRIED MOTHERS accounted for about 5 percent of births in the United States. Now they are having almost 40 percent of the country’s babies. About half of these women are on their own, and the other half are living with a man at the time of the birth, according to Pamela Smock, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The stock characters of the explosion of out-of-wedlock births are feckless fathers and hapless young mothers. It’s true that most unmarried mothers are still in their 20s — and less often in their teens — and have no more than a high-school education. But as television’s Murphy Brown predicted in the 1990s, an increasing number of unmarried mothers look a lot more like Fran McElhill and Nancy Clark — they are college-educated, and they are in their 30s, 40s and 50s.
According to data compiled by Lucie Schmidt, an economist at Williams College, the birthrate for unmarried college-educated women has climbed 145 percent since 1980, compared with a 60 percent increase in the birthrate for non-college-educated unmarried women. The number of first births for unmarried college-educated women reached a high of 47,000 in 2005, the last year for which numbers are available, compared with about 670,000 first births to non-college-graduates. “Even though the absolute numbers are small, what’s striking is how fast the birthrate to the college-educated group has increased,” Schmidt says. Unmarried women also adopt thousands of children every year — about 13,000 from the U.S. child-welfare system, as well as thousands of private and international adoptions whose numbers aren’t tracked well.
Unmarried college-educated mothers tend to be older: close to 40 percent of them give birth for the first time after age 30, compared with only about 8 percent overall . . .
What’s less familiar is what these women do next. Increasingly, instead of giving their children a father, they give them a sibling . . .
Hat tip: Institute for Marriage and Public Policy
Ann Coulter responds on Townhall: Secondhand Children
. . . The Times simply made up the fact that poverty, rather than single motherhood, causes anti-social behavior in children. Poverty doesn’t cause crime — single mothers do . . .
If the establishment media wrote about smoking the way they write about unwed motherhood, I think people would notice that they seem oddly hellbent on destroying as many lives as possible.
