In
Coming Apart,
Charles Murray writes of an emerging class distinction in America: people with less income and education are more likely to have
out-of-wedlock births than those who are affluent and have been to college.
The Census provides some new data:
As of 2011, 62 percent of women age 20 to 24 who gave birth in the previous 12 months were unmarried, according to a report released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. This compares with 17 percent among women age 35 to 39.
The information comes from Social and Economic Characteristics of Currently Unmarried Women with a Recent Birth: 2011, an American Community Survey report. The analysis is based on separate survey questions on whether women have given birth to any children in the past 12 months and what their marital status is. The statistics in the report are presented at the national and state levels, with a separate table and map containing metropolitan area data.
"This is the first report from the Census Bureau showing geographic variation in recent births to unmarried women, as well as characteristics of the women such as educational attainment," said Rose Kreider, a family demographer with the Census Bureau and one of the report's authors. "The American Community Survey is the nation's exclusive source of data on the demographic characteristics of mothers with this level of geographic detail."
In 2011, 4.1 million women reported that they had given birth in the last year. Of these women, 36 percent were unmarried at the time of the survey, an increase from 2005 when an estimated 31 percent of recent births were to unmarried women (2005 was the earliest year for which statistics are available from the American Community Survey).
"The increased share of unmarried recent mothers is one measure of the nation's changing family structure," Kreider said. "Nonmarital fertility has been climbing steadily since the 1940s and has risen even more markedly in recent years."
The American Community Survey asks the question on fertility for a variety of reasons, including to help project the future size of the population and to carry out various programs required by law, such as researching matters on child welfare.
The proportion of recent births to unmarried women varied widely by other
socio-economic characteristics besides age. For example, more than half (57 percent) of women with less than a high school diploma in 2011, who had given birth in the past year were unmarried, the highest percentage among the education groups. In contrast, only 9 percent of recent mothers with a bachelor's degree or higher were unmarried. (See Figure 2)
Similarly, there are wide variations when examining recent births by household income level. The share of unmarried women who gave birth ranged from 69 percent in household with incomes of less than $10,000 per year to 9 percent in households with annual income of $200,000 or more.
