Unwed Pregnancies, a Midwife of Poverty, Are Battled From Right, Left

Without anyone explicitly organizing it, the United States has embarked on a vast social experiment to test the favorite theories of left and right for reversing the generation-long rise in out-of-wedlock births.

Reducing the number of children born outside of marriage remains one of the country’s most pressing social needs. Despite enormous efforts by most single parents (almost all of them mothers), children raised without the support of two parents are more likely to use drugs, drop out of school or become unmarried parents themselves.

Above all, the high rates of unmarried pregnancy (and of divorce) are at the root of America’s persistently high levels of childhood poverty--the subject of separate speeches last week by Vice President Al Gore and former Sen. Bill Bradley, his challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination. Just under 30% of all children now live in single-parent families. Those children account for almost 65% of all children in poverty.

It may not be possible to vastly reduce childhood poverty--as Bradley urged last week--without enlarging the number of children benefiting from the increased economic stability of a two-parent family. And that won’t be possible without reducing the number of children born outside of marriage--now nearly one-third of all births. The rub has been finding a way to do this.

Yet now, without any master plan, the country seems to be drifting into a two-track strategy for combating unwed parenthood--one that combines the priorities of liberals and conservatives. For years, the left has argued that the key to reducing unmarried pregnancies is to increase opportunity so that young people (especially in poor neighborhoods) can see something in their future besides babies. Bradley reflected that thinking last week when he declared: “Hope is ultimately the best antidote to self-destructive behavior.”

As the economic expansion continues, opportunity is now increasing, even for groups usually last in the hiring line. Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute says that from mid-1992 through mid-1999, the unemployment rate fell by one-fourth for black men with high school diplomas or less. For both black women and Latino men at the same education level, the decline was one-third.

Though the remaining unemployment levels remain too high (just under one-fourth for black men and one-fifth for black women), those trends represent dramatic progress. And, for the first time in years, wages and income are rising for workers with fewer skills. That’s partly because President Clinton and Congress have taken a series of steps to support work, such as raising the minimum wage and increasing the earned income tax credit. Bradley last week called for further increases in both.

Conservatives, meanwhile, have long argued that the key to reducing unwed pregnancy is to make it less attractive by demanding more responsibility from parents. Society is now doing that too. Welfare reform ended the lifetime guarantee of public support for unwed mothers and imposed both time limits on aid and requirements for work. The welfare rolls have fallen by nearly half since Clinton took office. At the same time, Clinton and Congress have significantly toughened child support collection from absent fathers, tangibly increasing the price of unwed fatherhood. Gore last week called for moving much further down that track, with new requirements for men to support the families they help to create.

It is difficult to find a direct cause-and-effect link between these broad economic and policy changes and the trends in unwed pregnancy. Former Education Secretary William J. Bennett, who last week released the new edition of “The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators,” a book tracking American social trends, notes that the share of children born out of wedlock has increased in four of the five states where the welfare caseload has fallen fastest. And programs directly targeting teen pregnancy have mostly fizzled, notes sociologist Sara McLanahan, who directs the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton University.

But overall, the story on family formation in the economic and policy climate of the 1990s is much more positive than in the 1970s or 1980s. The best news is the birthrate among unmarried teens--that is, the number of pregnancies for every 1,000 unmarried teenage girls. After doubling from 1970 through 1991, the unmarried teen birthrate fell by 5% from 1991 through 1997. (Among black teens, it fell by a fifth.) The birthrate for all unmarried women, after jumping by 71% from 1970 through 1991, has also dipped slightly since then. But partly because the fertility rate has also fallen among married women, the share of all births to unmarried women has drifted up from 28% in 1990 to almost 33% now.

That’s a daunting number. At least the share of babies born to unwed women, while still rising, is rising much slower than in the 1970s and 1980s. The question is whether it is possible to reverse the trend altogether.

All signs say it won’t be easy. The share of children born outside of marriage is rising across the industrial world, driven by tectonic social forces--from women’s increasing economic independence to changing cultural attitudes about sex. “The area of family,” notes Bennett, “is least amenable to direction by public policy.” But the recent stabilizing trend in unmarried pregnancy suggests that even family breakdown is not entirely immune to broader changes in the economy and public policy.

America may never re-create a cul-de-sac world in which almost all children live with two parents. But the 1990s have shown that even the most intractable social problems--from welfare dependency to crime--can be effectively confronted with creative policies built on linking opportunity to responsibility. The key to future progress in discouraging unwed pregnancy may be to follow that same formula--simultaneously expanding opportunity while demanding responsibility. “There is no magic bullet,” says McLanahan. “But our theory is that these things really reinforce each other. It’s obvious that what you want is a mix of things that target both the men and the women and move them in the same direction.”

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