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Friday May 7, 2010


U.S. Study: Women Waiting Longer to Have Children and Record Number are Unmarried

By Thaddeus M. Baklinski

WASHINGTON, DC, May 7, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A report published by the Pew Research Center yesterday says that women in the United States are waiting longer to begin having children, and far fewer of them are married.

The study by Gretchen Livingston and D’Vera Cohn examined the changing demographic characteristics of U.S. mothers by comparing women who gave birth in 2008 with those who gave birth in 1990.

The researchers found that since 1990, the percentage of new mothers over the age of 35 has risen by five per cent, while the percentage of unmarried mothers has jumped 13 per cent to a record 41 per cent.

“Mothers of newborns are older now than their counterparts were two decades ago,” the report states. “In 1990, teens had a higher share of all births (13%) than did women ages 35 and older (9%). In 2008, the reverse was true — 10% of births were to teens, compared with 14% to women ages 35 and older.”

Livingston and Cohn explain that they believe the delay in age of motherhood is associated with the delay in age of marriage and with women’s growing educational attainment and emphasis on career goals.

“The more education a woman has, the later she tends to marry and have children. Birth rates also have risen for the most educated women, those with at least some college education, while being relatively stable for women with less education. These dual factors have worked together to increase the education levels of mothers of newborns.”

However, the report points out that while attitudes to motherhood are “evolving” the study also confirms the growing trend toward single-parent families and fatherless homes.

“Another notable change during this period was the rise in births to unmarried women. In 2008, a record 41% of births in the United States were to unmarried women, up from 28% in 1990. The share of births that are non-marital is highest for black women (72%), followed by Hispanics (53%), whites (29%) and Asians (17%), but the increase over the past two decades has been greatest for whites — the share rose 69%.”

The researchers found that though “Americans have softened slightly in their disapproval of unmarried parenthood, … most say it is bad for society.”

The Pew Research Center report finishes on an optimistic note saying that, despite the increasing age of first motherhood and the destabilizing effect on society of single parenting, the overall fertility rate for the U.S. is higher than in other developed nations, which the authors suggest may be attributable to the “religiosity of the U.S. population … because it is associated with a desire for larger families.”

“That rate for the United States, 2.10 in 2008, is about what it was in 1990. The number is about or slightly below the ‘replacement rate’ – that is, the level at which enough children are born to replace their parents in the population – and has been for most years since the baby bust of the early 1970s,” the report states.

More ominously for countries that have birth rates below the replacement level, the report concludes that, “Compared with Canada, and most nations in Europe and Asia, the U.S. has a higher total fertility rate. Rates such as 1.4 in Austria, Italy and Japan have produced concern about whether those nations will have enough people of working age in the future to support their elderly populations, and whether their total populations could decline in size.”

A summary of the Pew Research Center report, titled “The New Demography of American Motherhood” is available here.

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