"Of the 61.4 million women who were 15 to 44 years old in June 2002, 3.8 million gave birth in the preceding 12 months; 1.4 million were first births.  This produced an estimated fertility rate of 61 births per 1,000 women 15 to 44 years old and a corresponding first-birth rate of 23 births per 1,000 women.

...Estimates from the June 2002 CPS indicate that approximately 1.3 million women gave birth out of wedlock in the 12-month period preceding the survey, representing 33 percent of all births during this period."

(Source: Barbara Downs, "Fertility of American Women: June 2002," Current Population Reports P20-548, The United States Census Bureau, October 2003; http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/p20-548.pdf.)  

"The rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock birth have little to do with tax laws or lack of education about the harm it does to children and everything to do with government officials who have a vested interest in forced divorce and father eviction. ...The divorce industry has rendered marriage, in effect, a fraudulent contract. ...Until marriage is made an enforceable contract, there is little point in preaching to young people to put their trust in it.

(Source: Stephen Baskerville, "The Great Divorce," Washington Times, April 1, 2001; quoted at http://www.backlash.com/content/quotes/2001/quot0501.htm.)   

As wedlock has unraveled among impoverished urban minorities, many young women who would like to marry are deciding that childbearing outside of marriage offers them their only opportunity to form a family. To isolate the social and cultural contexts within which young women in America are now choosing to bear children out of wedlock, a team of demographers from the University of Michigan recently scrutinized data for women included in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth conducted from 1979 to 1991.

Some of the findings of this new study suggest an entirely predictable continuity from the past. For instance, in calculating the likelihood of a woman's bearing a child outside wedlock, the researchers find that "women from nonintact families have a significantly higher risk than women from intact families" (p < .01 for all three statistical models used).

The researchers also highlight a very significant cultural shift in childbearing outside marriage. Their data from recent decades indicate that compared to women who do not conceive nonmaritally, "women who are more inclined to conceive nonmaritally are also more inclined to marry, and this relationship reflects that the behaviors may be part of a more general process of family building." That is, it would appear that in post-Sixties America, the disproportionately impoverished and uneducated unwed mothers who bear children outside wedlock "place a high value on family experiences," but, finding themselves at the mercy of "changing social and economic realities" which have made marriage highly unlikely for them, opt for some kind of family life "regardless of the particular form [it] may take."

In keeping with the value-neutrality now regnant in academe, the Michigan researchers regard the emergence of "nonmarital fertility" as a major "family-building strategy," as simply part of the way "the definition and complexion of the family have changed over the past several decades." Americans who regard questions of social values with less apathy may view this new family-building strategy with deep concern.

(Source: Dawn M. Upchurch, Lee A. Lillard, and Constantijn W.A. Panis, "Nonmarital Childbearing: Influences of Education, Marriage, and Fertility," Demography 39[2002]: 311-329.)