Our heartless inattention to the collapse of marriage

It's hard to imagine the unemployment rate rising steeply for decades without public outcry. But that's exactly what's happened in the case of another significant indicator: the unwed birth rate.

Hardly anyone noticed this spring when new data showed 40 percent of all births are to unmarried mothers. That's way up from 7 percent in the mid-1960s, when a young White House appointee named Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to sound the alarm.

Moynihan, then an assistant Labor secretary in the Johnson administration, issued a report in 1965 warning that disintegration of the black family in America threatened Johnson's War on Poverty.

"(D)ollars of income, standards of living, and years of education deceive. ... The fundamental problem is that of family structure. (The black) family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself."

Regrettably, history proved Moynihan — the future Democratic senator from New York — to be correct. When the Moynihan Report was released, one out of four black children was born to an unwed mother. Now, a staggering three out of four black children are born outside marriage.

That fact will cast a long shadow down the course of a child's life. As one prominent black author wrote in 2006:

"(C)hildren living with single mothers are five times more likely to be poor than children in two-parent households. Children in single-parent homes are also more likely to drop out of school and become teen parents, even when income is factored out. And the evidence suggests that on average, children who live with their biological mother and father do better than those who live in stepfamilies or with cohabiting partners."

About two-thirds of poor children live in single-parent homes. Government spends $300 billion annually to assist low-income single parents.

But if poor single mothers married the fathers of their children, nearly two-thirds could escape poverty immediately. About half of unwed mothers are cohabiting with the father at the time of birth, and three out of four are in a romantic relationship with the father. Not only are most of these men employed when the child is born, research shows that more than half earn enough to be the breadwinner and keep a family out of poverty.

Yet discussions of poverty rarely address the collapse of marriage. Two generations of children have paid the price for adults ignoring Moynihan's prophecy.

Avoiding the central problem, many focused on births to teen girls. Indeed, release of the alarming new data that 40 percent of all children and 72 percent of black children are born outside marriage produced headlines concentrating on teen births.

However, only about one in seven out-of-wedlock births is to a girl younger than 18. The typical mother of a child born outside marriage is in her early 20s and without much income or education. In other words, she's not Murphy Brown.

Some have avoided confronting the collapse of marriage for fear of stigmatizing fatherless children. After all, these kids are the innocent victims of the marital chaos.

But children are also already painfully aware of the absence of fathers, points out Dr. Wade Horn, who oversaw programs for children and families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Children have a natural "father hunger," Horn says. When adults pretend nothing's wrong when Daddy is gone, it tells children their longing is the problem, compounding their hurt and confusion.

To ignore the collapse of marriage is heartless. For the sake of children, especially, we should muster all our ingenuity and resources to restore a culture of marriage in America.

President Barack Obama clearly recognizes the significance of marriage for the welfare of children. The quote cited earlier is from his 2006 book "The Audacity of Hope."

In the same passage, Obama concludes: "In light of these facts, policies that strengthen marriage for those who choose it and that discourage unintended births outside of marriage are sensible goals to pursue."

But rather than backing such policies, the president's 2011 budget would eliminate the one program dedicated to encouraging healthy marriage. In its place would be a program promoting a notion of "fatherhood" that doesn't involve the father being married or in the home.

Sadly, President Obama's action is yet another way to avoid addressing the collapse of marriage and its consequences.

The facts speak for themselves. It's time more policy-makers noticed what the facts are saying.

I’m not sure that conservatives help in this situation. Many conservatives look at their young unmarried pregnant daughters, they The Lord they didn’t abort but never encourage adoption.

No one gives any consequences to those pregnancies.

My daughters have been told over and over that if they screw up and get pregnant, a really nice family will raise their child. I’ve put in their heads that the best thing an unwed teen can do is give a child a chance with a family.

Luckily, we have many adoptive families around us. And yes, I have been slammed here for that view.

Hispanic Family Values? Runaway illegitimacy is creating a new U.S. underclass.

"Unless the life chances of children raised by single mothers suddenly improve, the explosive growth of the U.S. Hispanic population over the next couple of decades does not bode well for American social stability. Hispanic immigrants bring near–Third World levels of fertility to America, coupled with what were once thought to be First World levels of illegitimacy. (In fact, family breakdown is higher in many Hispanic countries than here.) Nearly half of the children born to Hispanic mothers in the U.S. are born out of wedlock, a proportion that has been increasing rapidly with no signs of slowing down. Given what psychologists and sociologists now know about the much higher likelihood of social pathology among those who grow up in single-mother households, the Hispanic baby boom is certain to produce more juvenile delinquents, more school failure, more welfare use, and more teen pregnancy in the future."

The dimensions of the Hispanic baby boom are startling. The Hispanic birthrate is twice as high as that of the rest of the American population. That high fertility rate—even more than unbounded levels of immigration—will fuel the rapid Hispanic population boom in the coming decades. By 2050, the Latino population will have tripled, the Census Bureau projects. One in four [now one in three according to the Census Bureau] Americans will be Hispanic by mid-century, twice the current ratio. In states such as California and Texas, Hispanics will be in the clear majority. Nationally, whites will drop from near 70 percent of the total population in 2000 to just half by 2050 [now 2042]. Hispanics will account for 46 percent of the nation’s added population over the next two decades, the Pew Hispanic Center reports.

"But it’s the fertility surge among unwed Hispanics that should worry policymakers. Hispanic women have the highest unmarried birthrate in the country—over three times that of whites and Asians, and nearly one and a half times that of black women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Every 1,000 unmarried Hispanic women bore 92 children in 2003 (the latest year for which data exist), compared with 28 children for every 1,000 unmarried white women, 22 for every 1,000 unmarried Asian women, and 66 for every 1,000 unmarried black women. Forty-five percent of all Hispanic births occur outside of marriage, compared with 24 percent of white births and 15 percent of Asian births. Only the percentage of black out-of-wedlock births—68 percent—exceeds the Hispanic rate. But the black population is not going to triple over the next few decades."

"The only bright news in this demographic disaster story concerns teen births. Overall teen childbearing in the U.S. declined for the 12th year in a row in 2003, having dropped by more than a third since 1991. Yet even here, Hispanics remain a cause for concern. The rate of childbirth for Mexican teenagers, who come from by far the largest and fastest-growing immigrant population, greatly outstrips every other group. The Mexican teen birthrate is 93 births per every 1,000 girls, compared with 27 births for every 1,000 white girls, 17 births for every 1,000 Asian girls, and 65 births for every 1,000 black girls. To put these numbers into international perspective, Japan’s teen birthrate is 3.9, Italy’s is 6.9, and France’s is 10. Even though the outsize U.S. teen birthrate is dropping, it continues to inflict unnecessary costs on the country, to which Hispanics contribute disproportionately.

This was so predictable. Moynihan didn't quite get it, but it is very simple. If a large percentage of the people who feel "scandalized" by births outside of marriage get abortions while those who don't feel "scandalized" go ahead and have their first babies, you eventually end up with a very small population of abortion rights activists and a very large population of women who have their first child outside of marriage.

Kind of like they have to prove they are fertile if they hope to ever get married.

There is a different relative birth rate between the two populations ~ probably most marked in the United Kingdom, but also enough to shift political outcomes in the United States as well.

Varda: “They see nothing wrong with illegitimacy.”

Do you mean they don’t think premarital sex is sinful? Or, do you mean they think children should be blamed or treated different simply because they are illegitimate?

I know a lot of professing Christians who turn a blind eye to sex before marriage and tell their adult offspring to hold off on marriage until they are older and financially stable. Many of these same Christians were relatively young when they first had sex, but they advise their offspring not to marry until much later. I ask, what’s better, living a life that is holy and maybe a bit less materially well off or risking Hell for material wealth?

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