Nonmarital Pregnancies and Marriage in the United States

Abstract

One important change in postwar American family-formation patterns has been a sharp decline in the probability that single women pregnant with their.first child marry during their pregnancies and thus legitimate the birth. In this article we.first discuss the social context surrounding this change. Our empirical analysis offour national cross-sectional fertility surveys covering the early 1950s throughl the late 1980s then documents the decreasing likelihood of legitimation for women from most racial, social, and family backgrounds. Finally, we use longitudinal data for recent cohorts of young women to investigate the attitudinal, familial, and scholastic factors that shape their decisions about legitimating a nonmarital pregnancy. One of the most significant changes in family formation in the postwar U.S. has been a dramatic rise in childbearing outside of marriage. In 1991, about 1,214,000 births, almost 30% of the nation's total, occurred to unmarried women (National Center for Health Statistics 1993). Most of the research and public policy initiatives spurred by these increasingly high levels of nonmarital childbearing have focused on women's premarital sexual activity and pregnancy (Hayes 1987). Yet nonmarital childbearing, by definition, involves marriage behavior as well as fertility. Recent studies have demonstrated that changes in women's marriage behavior have played a major role in the increases in the numbers of nonmarital births (Nathanson & Kim 1989; Smith & Cutright 1988). During the late 1950s, over 50% of women who were single when they conceived their first child married before the child's birth (O'Connell & Rogers 1984), but by 1988 only 22% did so (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1989). In this article we examine trends and patterns in the legitimation' of first births in the U.S. over the last three decades. In the first section, we show * This research was partially suipported by a contractfrom the U.S. National Instituite of Child Health and Huiman Development (NOl-HD-42815) with the Carolina Popullation Center. Ida Harper Simpson provided helpfiul comments on an earlier version. Direct correspondence to Allan Parnell, Department of Sociology, Box 90088, Dulke University, Duirham, NC 27708. ? The University of North Carolina Press Social Forces, September 1994, 73(1):263-87 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.64 on Sat, 03 Sep 2016 04:06:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 264 / Social Forces 73:1, September 1994 declines in the likelihood of legitimating marriages from 1955 through 1984 using retrospective data pooled from cycles I-IV of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). In the second section, we use longitudinal data from the High School and Beyond Study (HS&B) to investigate the attitudinal, familial, and scholastic factors that shape young women's decisions about legitimating a nonmarital pregnancy.