Women in the News

As someone who loves children and wants to have children I feel doubly fortunate in being over the age of thirty and the holder of a university degree. Statistically it means my children are less likely to be born illegitimate, not that the word gets much of an outing these days as it carries moral overtones of condemnation. In fact it’s only 150 years ago in Britain that women with illegitimate children were driven from the Parish and the birth certificate of the poor offspring emphatically marked with the accolade ‘bastard.’

Now it seems illegitimacy is the new norm. The statistics I have been reading relate to the USA, although I am sure they apply equally here in Britain – perhaps more so as by all accounts America is a much more God fearing country. In the USA it seems after steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

According to Child Trends, a Washington research group working with government data, illegitimacy once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has become an integral part of middle America. It seems the fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree.

Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the growth of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 — is becoming a hint of coming generational change and perhaps may even herald the demise of the family.

One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who still overwhelmingly marry before having children. Not only does this hint at underlying financial reasons behind the illegitimacy trend, but this is also turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the best education.

“Marriage has become a luxury good,” says Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Most worryingly is the affect this is having on children’s lives. Researchers have consistently found that children born outside marriage face higher risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioural problems. Ironic then that the same moralists who bewail these dangers are often those who want to deny marriage to gay couples?

The forces rearranging the family are as diverse as globalization and the pill and in the halls of academe the arguments will provide fodder for PhD students for years to come. Notwithstanding this the decline in what can be considered a decent living wage, as money is siphoned off to pay banker’s ballooning bonuses can do little other than thin the ranks of marriageable men. Others will blame the sexual revolution and the fact that ill-conceived safety net programs discourage marriage.

Either way, as women genetically programmed to procreate and to do the best for our offspring this is a very worrying trend. Maybe it will cause us to think more about the rabid greed of bankers and multinationals – and before somebody says Capitalism is good for us they should dwell on the fact that Capitalism is dead. Bailing out the banks and General Motors, means that the social Darwinsim of allowing failures to go the wall – competition - the life blood of a healthy capitalist system is no more… except for those smaller companies who employ the poor who can hardly afford to marry.

(Statistics from The Huffington Post)