In others, they are living with a partner but not married, a pattern that is common in parts of Europe. In many cases, these women carefully planned to have children without a partner, she said. “I don’t think people realize that there are a lot of older women now who are having babies deliberately, single mothers by choice,” said Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Generation Unbound: Drifting Into Sex and Parenthood Without Marriage. It could increasingly become one of the new ways people are choosing to form families, in an era when both marriage and divorce are declining.
But if these trends continue, single motherhood could become less of a sign of family instability. In many cases, they are having babies outside marriage by choice, with more resources and education than the typical single mother. There was only one group of unmarried women for whom the birthrate increased in recent years: those 35 or older. The recent declines were sharpest among teenagers black and Latino women and those without a college degree - all of whom typically have had the highest rates of single motherhood - according to data from the Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics. The lawyer defending same-sex marriage bans before the Supreme Court last month argued that out-of-wedlock births were growing rapidly.īut the birthrate for unmarried mothers, which had been steadily increasing since the early 1980s, peaked in 2008 and has declined 14 percent since, more than the decline for all women. Single parenthood was on a “mysterious and alarming rise,” becoming a “huge problem,” according to a 2013 article in The Atlantic.
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