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| https://www.lee.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/socialcapitalproject?ContentRecord_id=24993658-359C-4039-B672-19AF5E444B0F | Love, Marriage, and the Baby Carriage: The Rise in Unwed Childbearing | 2017-12-11 | 2017 | 2017-12 | Republican | House | UT | Mike Lee | L000577 | www.lee.senate.gov | legacy | Note that in all analyses, “unmarried” includes women cohabiting with a romantic partner who is not her husband. “Married” includes couples in which one spouse is absent from the home and (except where noted) separated couples. Figure 1. Share of Births that Occur to Unmarried Women, 1940-2015 1940-1999 estimates are from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Nonmarital Childbearing in the United States, 1940-99, National Vital Statistics Reports 48(16), by Stephanie J. Ventura and Christine A. Bacharach, October 18, 2000 “Number, rate, and percent of births to unmarried women and birth rate for married women: United States, 1940-99,” Table 1, accessed December 5, 2017, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr48/nvs48_16.pdf. 2000-2014 estimates are from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Births: Final Data for 2014, National Vital Statistics Reports 64(12), by Brady E. Hamilton et al., December 23, 2015, “Births and birth rates for unmarried and married women: United States, 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, and 2000–2014” Table B, accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_12.pdf. 2015 estimate is from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Births: Final Data for 2015, National Vital Statistics Reports 66(1), by Joyce A. Martin, Brady E. Hamilton, Michelle J.K. Osterman, Anne K. Driscoll, and T.J. Mathews, January 5, 2017, “Births and birth rates for unmarried women, by age and race and Hispanic origin of mother: United States, 2015,” Table 15, accessed December 5, 2017, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr66/nvsr66_01.pdf. Figure 2. Median Age at First Marriage among Women, 1890-2016 U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Marital Status Tables, “Estimated Median Age at First Marriage: 1890 to present,” accessed December 5, 2017, https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/families/time-series/marital/ms2.xls. Figure 3. Percentage of Women Ages 30-34 Never Married, 1880-2016 1880-1970 estimates are from Social Capital Project analyses of decennial census data, using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series Online Data Analysis System, accessed December 5, 2017, http://sda.usa.ipums.org/cgi-bin/sdaweb/hsda?harcsda+all_usa_samples. (Steven Ruggles, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Josiah Grover, and Matthew Sobek, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 7.0 [dataset], [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017], accessed December 5, 2017, https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V7.0.) The 1850-1950 trend includes women who are separated, as it is not possible to distinguish them from never-married women prior to 1950. The 1950-1970 trend excludes separated women. 1962-2016 estimates are from Social Capital Project analyses of data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey, using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series Online Data Analysis System, https://sda.cps.ipums.org/cgi-bin/sdaweb/hsda?harcsda+all_march_samples. (Sarah Flood, Miriam King, Steven Ruggles, and J. Robert Warren. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Current Population Survey: Version 5.0 [dataset], [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017], accessed December 5, 2017, https://doi.org/10.18128/D030.V5.0.) Separated women are excluded. Figure 4. Percentage of Ever-Married Women Ages 50-54 Who Ever Divorced, 1940-2015 1940-1980 estimates are from Social Capital Project analyses of data from the decennial census and the American Community Survey, using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series Online Data Analysis System, http://sda.usa.ipums.org/cgi-bin/sdaweb/hsda?harcsda+all_usa_samples. (Ruggles et al., 2017.) It is not possible to distinguish previously widowed from previously divorced women, unless either occurred after the most recent marriage (in which case their marital status at the time of the survey indicates divorced or widowed). We assume the ratio of ever divorced to ever widowed women among those with two or more marriages to be the same in each year as the ratio of currently divorced to currently widowed women 50-54. This approach misses some widows who also have been divorced and thereby undercounts ever-divorced women (if our assumption is otherwise correct). Estimates are unavailable in the 1990 and 2000 decennial censuses or in the American Community Survey prior to 2008. Figure 5. Percentage of Women Ages 15-44 Who are Married, 1880-2016 1880-1970 estimates are from Social Capital Project analyses of decennial census data, using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series Online Data Analysis System, http://sda.usa.ipums.org/cgi-bin/sdaweb/hsda?harcsda+all_usa_samples. (Ruggles et al., 2017.) The 1850-1950 trend excludes women who are separated, as they are combined with never-married women in the data prior to 1950. The 1950-1970 trend includes separated women. 1962-2016 estimates are from Social Capital Project analyses of data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey, using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series Online Data Analysis System, https://sda.cps.ipums.org/cgi-bin/sdaweb/hsda?harcsda+all_march_samples. (Flood et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Current Population Survey: Version 5.0, 2017.) Separated women are included. Figure 6. Births to Married Couples per 1,000 Married Women, 1950-2015 1950-1989 estimates are from Ventura et al., Nonmarital Childbearing in the United States, 1940-99, Table 1. 1990-2000 estimates are from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Revised Birth and Fertility Rates for the 1990s and New Rates for Hispanic Populations, 2000 and 2001: United States, National Vital Statistics Reports 51(12), by Brady E. Hamilton, Paul D. Sutton, and Stephanie J. Ventura, August 4, 2003, “Birth rates for married women, by age, race, and Hispanic origin of mother: United States, 1990–2001,” Table 8, accessed December 5, 2017, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr51/nvsr51_12.pdf. 2001-2014 estimates are from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2015 “Births and birth rates for unmarried and married women: United States, 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, and 2000–2014,” Table B. 2015 estimate is U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2017, “Trends in marital and nonmarital birth rates: United States, 2005–2015,” Figure 4. Figure 7. Pregnancy Rates among Married Women, 1960-64 to 2005-09 These rates combine estimates of births from marital conceptions, abortions obtained by married women, and miscarriages and still births experienced by married women. Births from marital conceptions are from our analyses of the 1980 and 1995 Fertility and Marital History Supplements to the June Current Population Survey (CPS) and of various cycles of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). We pool births from five-year intervals (e.g., 1960-1964 and 2005-2009) but show data points in the chart at years ending in “2” and “7” (e.g., 1962 and 2007). The 1960-1964 estimate relies on the 1980 CPS data, the 1970-1974 estimate is an average from both the 1980 and 1995 CPS, the 1980-1984 estimate is an average from the 1995 CPS and the 1988 NSFG, the 1990-1994 estimate is an average from the 1995 CPS and 1995 NSFG, the 1995-1999 estimate is from the 2002 NSFG, the 2000-2004 estimate is from the 2006-2010 NSFG, and the 2005-2009 estimate is an average from the 2011-2013 and 2013-2015 NSFG. These specific surveys were selected for specific birth cohorts because they are representative of women who were between the ages of 15 and 44 at the time of their child’s birth (or reasonably close to representative). The 1980 CPS supplement included women as old as 75, which means that birth cohorts from as recently as 1979 are represented, as are cohorts from 1949 (when 75-year-old women taking the survey would have been 44 years old). The 1995 CPS supplement included women as old as 65, meaning it covers birth cohorts from 1974 to 1994. We chose to analyze the 1960-1974 cohorts using the 1980 CPS and the 1970-1994 cohorts using the 1995 CPS. (For the 1970 cohort, the 1995 CPS only captures births to women who were 15-40, for the 1971 cohort only births to women 15-41, and so on up to 15-44 for the 1974 cohort. The results were very similar to the 1970-1974 estimates using the 1980 CPS.) For the NSFG surveys, which only include women up to age 44, the birth cohorts are somewhat less representative. In the 1988 NSFG, for instance, not all 1988 births to 44-year-old women will have occurred. More problematically, if one would like to capture the 1980 birth cohorts, one will miss 1980 births to women age 37 or higher, because those women were older than 44 in 1988 and thus excluded from the NSFG. The 1984 birth cohort will exclude births to women older than 40 for the same reason. As a rule of thumb, we used an NSFG survey to represent a five-year birth cohort if births to all women 34 years old or younger were represented in the survey. In 2015, 84 percent of all births occurred to women under 35 years old, and 97 percent occurred to women under 40 years old, while just 56 percent occurred to women under 30 years old. (See U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2017.) We arrived at this rule after comparing estimates produced by different NSFG surveys for the same five-year birth cohorts. Estimates from surveys that excluded births to women, say, older than 42 were consistently similar to estimates from surveys excluding births to women, say, older than 36. In addition, estimates of the share of births that were to single mothers consistently were close to estimates from vital statistics data. In contrast, estimates from surveys excluding births to women, say, older than 29 indicated notably fewer births and yielded a higher share of births to single mothers. The most uncertain of these estimates is the one for 2005-2009, which averages five-year estimates from the most recent two NSFG surveys. The two surveys provided consistent estimates—44 percent and 43 percent of births were to single mothers—but those estimates were somewhat higher than in vital statistics data (39 percent). The analyses using the CPS modify the approach in an earlier Census Bureau report. (See U.S. Census Bureau, Trends in Premarital Childbearing: 1930-1994, Current Population Reports, by Amara Bachu, October 1999, https://www.census.gov/prod/99pubs/p23-197.pdf.) That report compares the timing of first births to that of first marriages for women 15-29. We generalize to all births to women of all ages. For each woman in the data, we compare dates for up to five births to dates of up to three marriages and up to three marriage terminations. For each birth, we characterize it as coming from a nonmarital conception leading to a nonmarital birth (births occurring while a woman was single), a nonmarital conception followed by a shotgun marriage (births occurring less than eight months subsequent to a marriage), or a marital conception (births occurring eight months or more after a marriage). The NSFG analyses compare reported marital status at the time of conception to marital status at the child’s birth. We confirmed that our methodology produced a very similar number of births and distribution of births by marital status at conception by marital status at birth as in U.S. Census Bureau (1999) for the same birth cohorts. We use the distribution of births estimated from these samples, averaged across samples as indicated, and divide the number of births (sometimes averaging across samples first) by five so that we can add births to annual estimates of abortion. To estimate abortions by marital status, we begin with abortion ratios (abortions divided by the sum of abortions plus births) for married and unmarried women age 15-44. For 1974, 1984, 1994, 1999, and 2004, those ratios are from the Guttmacher Institute. (See Stanley K. Henshaw and Kathryn Kost, “Trends in the Characteristics of Women Obtaining Abortion, 1974 to 2004,” Guttmacher Institute, August 2008, https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/trendswomenabortions-wtables.pdf.) For 2008, we compute the abortion ratios for women age 15-44 from abortion and birth estimates. Abortion estimates are computed by multiplying the number of abortions by the marital and nonmarital share of abortions. (See Rachel K. Jones and Jenna Jerman, “Abortion Incidence and Service Availability in the United States, 2014,” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 49, no. 1[2017], 17-27, Table 1.) Birth estimates are from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2015, Table B and Table 1. For 1960-1964 and 1965-1969, we begin with an estimate of abortions (legal and illegal) in 1969 from a 1982 study. (See Willard Cates, “Legal Abortion: The Public Health Record,” Science 215, no. 4540(1982), 1586-1590, Figure 1.) The illegal estimate (700,000) is the midpoint of a wide range estimated for 1955 (200,000-1,200,000). (See Mary S. Calderone, ed., Abortion in the United States (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958.) It is also very close to the number implied by a 1968 study of central, urban North Carolina (698,914), which used an inventive methodology that allowed an estimate of abortions to be obtained from the overall results of those surveyed without any individual in the study having to admit to having one. (See James R. Abernathy, Bernard G. Greenberg, and Daniel G. Horvitz, “Estimates of Induced Abortion in Urban North Carolina,” Demography 7, no. 1[1970], 19-29.) Applying this North Carolina study’s estimates to the 1967 population of women produced an estimate of around 829,000 abortions. Thus, 700,000 (or 722,000 adding in legal abortions) is likely an underestimate for 1969, and it is likely somewhat of an underestimate for 1960-1964 and 1965-1969. We then compute the 1969 abortion ratio using birth estimates from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2015. Finally, we distribute these births between married and unmarried women by comparing the overall abortion ratio in 1974 to the marital and nonmarital abortion ratios in 1974 and applying those ratios of ratios to the overall abortion ratio for 1969. We assume the 1969 abortion ratios for married and unmarried women apply to 1960-1964 and to 1965-1969. As a check against this approach, we re-estimated the marital and nonmarital abortion ratios using 1979 ratios instead of 1974 ones, which produces significantly smaller nonmarital abortion ratios for the 1960s. None of the results discussed in the paper are qualitatively different in any important way using these estimates. Once we have the abortion ratios for each year, we then apply the ratios by marital status to the number of births by marital status at birth, using the estimates from the CPS and NSFG (births following a shotgun marriage included with marital births). For example, the 1974 abortion ratios are applied to births to married and unmarried women from 1970 to 1974, the 1984 ratio to births from 1980 to 1984, etc. We add births from marital conceptions to marital abortions and births from nonmarital conceptions to nonmarital abortions. We convert these to rates by dividing by married and unmarried women. These come from our analyses using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series Online Data Analysis System, using decennial census data for 1960-1964, http://sda.usa.ipums.org/cgi-bin/sdaweb/hsda?harcsda+all_usa_samples and data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey for 1970-2009, https://sda.cps.ipums.org/cgi-bin/sdaweb/hsda?harcsda+all_march_samples. (Ruggles et al., 2017; Flood et al., 2017.) For 1960-1964, the estimate is interpolated between census years by multiplying the intercensal population change from 1960 to 1970 by 0.2 (corresponding roughly to a 1962 estimate). The estimates for 1970-2009 are actually five-year averages (1970-74,…, 2005-09). These estimates are adjusted by adding one quarter of births that come from a shotgun marriage to the number of unmarried women and subtracting them from the number of married women. This roughly reflects the fact that in the CPS data from which the 1970-2009 estimates are drawn, the survey takes place primarily in March, and at that point, one quarter of any year’s shotgun marriages might be expected to have taken place. For “fetal death rates” (miscarriages and still births) by marital status, we begin with 1990-2004 estimates of fetal loss rates by marital status from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, “Estimated Pregnancy Rates by Outcome for the United States, 1990-2004, National Vital Statistics Reports 56(15), by Stephanie J. Ventura, Joyce C. Abma, William D. Mosher, and Stanley K. Henshaw, April 14, 2008, “Pregnancy, live birth, and induced abortion rates by marital status and race and Hispanic origin: United States, 1990–2004,” Table 5, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr56/nvsr56_15.pdf. We use 2009 fetal loss rate estimates by marital status from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Pregnancy Rates for U.S. Women Continue to Drop, Data Brief no. 136, by Sally C. Curtin, Joyce C. Abma, Stephanie J. Ventura, and Stanley K. Henshaw, December 2013, “Pregnancy rates, by outcome and marital status: United States, 1990, 2000, and 2009,” Figure 5, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db136.pdf. We compute 1980 rates by subtracting (for each marital status) the live birth rates and the induced abortion rates from the pregnancy rates, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Trends in Pregnancies and Pregnancy Rates by Outcome: Estimates for the United States, 1976-96, Vital Health Statistics 21(56), by Stephanie J. Ventura, William D. Mosher, Sally C. Curtin, Joyce C. Abma, and Stanley K. Henshaw, January 2000, “Pregnancy, live birth, and induced abortion rates by marital status and race and Hispanic origin: United States, 1980 and 1990–95,” Table 6, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_21/sr21_056.pdf. Getting fetal loss rate estimates by marital status for 1960-1964 and 1970-1974 was more difficult. Fetal losses of at least 20 weeks gestation per 1,000 live births or fetal losses for women with “legitimate” and “illegitimate” pregnancies are available for 1945, 1955, and 1960 from U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Public Health Service, National Center for Health Statistics, Vital Statistics Rates in the United States 1940-1960, by Robert D. Grove and Alice M. Hetzel, 1968, “Fetal mortality ratios by legitimacy status, age of mother, and color: Reporting States, 1945,1966-60,” Table 36, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsus/vsrates1940_60.pdf. The same source provides the same fetal loss rates for white and black women, which closely match the rates for, respectively, “legitimate” and “illegitimate” pregnancies. This fact is useful because fetal loss rates for whites and blacks are available from this source for 1960, 1970, and 1980 too. Substituting white and black rates for married and unmarried rates per 1,000 live births or fetal losses, and using births per 1,000 married and unmarried women from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2000), we computed fetal losses of at least 20 weeks gestation per 1,000 married and unmarried women for 1960, 1970, and 1980. What we need are fetal losses from pregnancies of any length per 1,000 married and unmarried women. We compute the ratios of the 1960-to-1980 rates for fetal losses of at least 20 weeks gestation (separately for married and unmarried women) and of the 1970-to-1980 rates. Finally, we apply these ratios to our 1980 fetal loss rates by marital status from above. Adding fetal loss rates to the pregnancy rates involving live births or abortions yields overall pregnancy rates. We use 1960, 1970, and 1980 fetal loss rates for our 1960-1964, 1970-1974, and 1980-1984 pregnancy rates, and we use 1992, 1997, 2002, and 2009 rates for 1990-1994, 1995-1997, 2000-2004, and 2005-2009. Figure 8. Births to Single Mothers per 1,000 Single Women, 1940-2015 1940-1989 estimates are from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2000, Table 1. 1990-2000 estimates are from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Revised Birth and Fertility Rates for the 1990s and New Rates for Hispanic Populations, 2000 and 2001: United States, National Vital Statistics Reports 51(12), by Brady E. Hamilton, Paul D. Sutton, and Stephanie J. Ventura, August 4, 2003, “Birth rates for unmarried women, by age, race, and Hispanic origin of mother: United States, 1990–2001,” Table 7, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr51/nvsr51_12.pdf. 2001-2014 estimates are from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2015, Table B. 2015 estimate is from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2017, Table 15. Figure 9. Percent of Teenage Women Who Have Ever Had Sex, 1960-2015 1960-1972 “Never-Married 19” estimates (never-married women age 19) are taken from Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, “The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women’s Career and Marriage Decisions,” Journal of Political Economy 110, no. 4, 730-770. We eyeballed the estimates shown in the “before 19” line in Figure 6. The 1941 birth cohort would have been 19 in 1960, so we use the estimate for that cohort as our “1960” estimate. Similarly, the 1953 cohort would have been 19 in 1972. 1971-1982 “Age 18-19, Premarital” estimates are from Sandra L. Hofferth, Joan R. Kahn, and Wendy Baldwin, “Premarital Sexual Activity Among U.S. Teenage Women Over the Past Three Decades,” Family Planning Perspectives 19, no. 2(1987), 46-53, Table 2. We calculate the simple average of the 18- and 19-year-old rates. The rates indicate the share of all women 18-19 (married or unmarried) who ever had had premarital sex. 1982-1995 “Age 18-19” estimates are from Susheela Singh and Jacqueline E. Darroch, “Trends in Sexual Activity Among Adolescent American Women: 1982-1995,” Family Planning Perspectives 31, no. 5(1999), 212-219, Table 2, https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/article_files/3121299.pdf. 1988-2008 “Never-Married 18-19” estimates are from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease National Center for Health Statistics, Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, G. Martinez, C.E. Copen, and J.C. Abma, Teenagers in the United States: Sexual Activity, Contraceptive Use, and Childbearing, 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth, Vital Health Statistics 23(31), October 2011, “Never-married females and males aged 15–19 who have ever had sexual intercourse: United States, 1988, 1995, 2002, and 2006–2010,” Table 1, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_23/sr23_031.pdf. 2013 “Never-Married 18-19” estimate is from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Sexual Activity and Contraceptive Use Among Teenagers in the United States, 2011–2015, National Health Statistics Reports no. 104, by Joyce C. Abma and Gladys M. Martinez, June 22, 2017, “Percentage of never-married females and males aged 15–19 who have ever had sexual intercourse: United States, 2002, 2006–2010, and 2011–2015,” Table 1, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr104.pdf. The estimate is actually a five-year average from 2011-2015. Figure 10. Pregnancy and Birth Rates among Unmarried Women, 1960-64 to 2010-14 1962-2007 nonmarital pregnancy estimates are from Social Capital Project analyses. See note to Figure 7. 1962-2007 nonmarital birth estimates are five-year averages of the estimates in Figure 8. For example, “1962” is the average of the 1960-1964 rates. Figure 11. Unintended Pregnancies and Abortions as a Share of Pregnancies among Unmarried Women, 1974-2009 1974-2009 nonmarital abortion estimates are from Social Capital Project analyses. See the note to Figure 7. 1980-1984 to 2005-2009 nonmarital unintended pregnancy estimates are from Social Capital Project analyses. We estimate nonmarital unintended pregnancies ending in a birth using data from the National Survey of Family Growth. We use the 1988 NSFG for the 1980-1984 estimate, the 1995 NSFG for the 1985-1989 and 1990-1994 estimates, the 2002 NSFG for the 1995-1999 estimate, and the 2006-2010 NSFG for the 2000-2004 estimate. We average 2005-2009 estimates from the 2011-2013 and 2013-2015 NSFG. See the note to Figure 7 for our rationale. To these unintended births, we add estimates of nonmarital abortions among women 15-44. Then we divide by estimates of the number of nonmarital pregnancies among women 15-44. See the note to Figure 7 for details on both of these calculations. Unlike in our other analyses, we use only the NSFG to estimate births when we compute the number of nonmarital pregnancies (ignoring the CPS completely). These estimates are shown in the chart at 1972, 1977, 1982, 1987, 1992, 1997, 2002, and 2007. Figure 12. Percent of Births to Women that Began as Unwed Pregnancies and Percent of Unwed Births, 1950-54 to 2005-09 Estimates are from Social Capital Project analyses of CPS and NSFG data. See the note to Figure 7. Figure 13. Shotgun Marriage Rate, 1950-54 to 2005-09 1950-2009 estimates of the share of unwed births that follow a shotgun marriage are from Social Capital Project analyses of CPS and NSFG data. See the note to Figure 7. 1960-2009 estimates of the share of unwed pregnancies that end in a post-shotgun-marriage birth are from Social Capital Project analyses. The computation begins with the nonmarital pregnancy rates estimated for Figure 7 (see the note to that figure). We multiply the rates by the number of unmarried women (including as unmarried women a number equal to one-fourth of births following a shotgun marriage) to get nonmarital pregnancies (rather than rates). We then divide the number of nonmarital births following a shotgun marriage (see the note to Figure 7) by the number of pregnancies. Figure 14. Increase in the Share of Births That Are to Unwed Mothers, and Counterfactual Scenarios, 1960-64 to 2005-09 These estimates are based on those computed for Figure 7 (see the note to that figure). We decompose births from nonmarital conceptions in each year as the product of the number of women ages 15-44, the share of women 15-44 who are single, the nonmarital pregnancy rate per 1,000 women 15-44 (but excluding fetal deaths), and the percentage of nonmarital pregnancies (excluding fetal deaths) that do not end in abortion. We decompose nonmarital births as the product of births from nonmarital conceptions and one minus the shotgun marriage rate. We decompose births from marital conceptions as the product of the number of women ages 15-44, the share of women 15-44 who are married, the marital pregnancy rate (excluding fetal deaths), and the percentage of marital pregnancies (excluding fetal deaths) that do not end in abortion. We decompose marital births as births from marital conceptions plus the product of births from nonmarital conceptions and the shotgun marriage rate. Finally, we compute the unwed birth share as unwed births divided by the sum of marital and unwed births. This decomposition allows us to hold any of the component variables mentioned above at early 1960s levels while allowing other component variables to change over time. These decompositions resulted in estimated unwed birth shares of 7.9 percent in the early 1960s and 43.4 percent in the late 2000s (compared with 6.0 averaging vital statistics data estimates from 1960 to 1964 and 39.3 percent averaging 2005 to 2009). These simulations ignore fetal deaths and thereby assume that they are a constant share of pregnancies over the period. Our estimates suggest that, actually, fetal deaths were 13 percent of nonmarital pregnancies in 1960-1964 and 12 percent in 2005-2009, while they were 28 percent of marital pregnancies in 1960-1964 and 22 percent in 2005-2009. (See the notes to Figure 7.) These changes are too small to qualitatively affect our results. Figure 15. Increase in the Share of Births That Are to Unwed Mothers, and Counterfactual Scenarios, Previously Childless Women 15-29, 1960-64 to 2005-09 These estimates are based on estimates for childless women ages 15-29 that are analogous to the estimates for all women ages 15-44 computed for the analyses in Figure 7. Beginning with births by marital status at conception and at birth, for 1960-1994 we use estimates taken from U.S. Census Bureau (1999) of the number of births and distribution. For 1995-2009, we produce our own estimates using various NSFG surveys. The 1995-1999 estimates are averages from the 2002 and 2006-2010 NSFG, the 2000-2004 estimates are averages from the 2006-2010 and 2011-2013 NSFG, and the 2005-2009 estimates are averages from the 2011-2013 and 2013-2015 NSFG. We estimate abortions as for all women ages 15-44, except that we have to assume that the abortion ratios (abortions divided by the sum of abortions and births) for unmarried and married childless women ages 15-29 are the same as for all unmarried and married women ages 15-44. How valid is this assumption? Abortion ratios for married and unmarried women between the ages of 15 and 29 (childless or not) were close to those for married and unmarried women between the ages of 15 and 44 in 1983 and 1987. The ratio for younger married women was about 15 percent lower than for all married women in both years, and the ratio for younger unmarried women was 1 to 2 percentage points lower. This is reassuring in that the difference between the two age groups is always small and is similar in both years. The discrepancies are not enough to qualitatively change our point-in-time 1980s estimates, but if the bias changed over time, that would affect our trends. See Stanley K. Henshaw, “Characteristics of U.S. Women Having Abortions, 1982-1983,” Family Planning Perspectives 19, no. 1(1987): 5-9, and Stanley K. Henshaw, Lisa M. Koonin, and Jack C. Smith, “Characteristics of U.S. Women Having Abortions, 1987,” Family Planning Perspectives 23, no. 2(1991), 75-81. It is not clear whether the ratios for childless younger women are similar to the ratios for all women. Childless women account for a declining share of abortions over time—58 percent in 1980 but just 41 percent in 2014—but so do women 15-29 (82 percent versus 72 percent). See Henshaw et al. (1991) and Jenna Jerman, Rachel K. Jones, and Tsuyoshi Onda, “Characteristics of U.S. Abortion Patients in 2014 and Changes Since 2008,” Guttmacher Institute, May 2016, https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/characteristics-us-abortion-patients-2014.pdf. It is likely, then, that childless women account for a similar share of women 15-29 over time, which suggests that the abortion ratio for women 15-29 is roughly no better or worse a proxy for the ratio among childless women 15-29 over time. As for the analyses in Figure 7, our estimates for the number of married and unmarried women come from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series Online Data Analysis System, using decennial census data for 1960-1964 (http://sda.usa.ipums.org/cgi-bin/sdaweb/hsda?harcsda+all_usa_samples) and data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey for 1970-2009 (https://sda.cps.ipums.org/cgi-bin/sdaweb/hsda?harcsda+all_march_samples). (Ruggles et al., 2017; Flood et al., 2017.) We conduct the counterfactual simulations for the results displayed in Figure 15 in the same way as for Figure 14. As in the Figure 14 analyses, these simulations ignore fetal deaths and thereby assume that they are a constant share of pregnancies over the period. 1 W. Bradford Wilcox et al., Why Marriage Matters, Third Edition: Thirty Conclusions from the Social Sciences (New York: Institute for American Values, 2011), accessed December 4, 2017, http://www.americanvalues.org/search/item.php?id=81#.UV7T6ze9EgU. 2 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS–4), by A.J. Sedlak et al., 2010, accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.acf.hhs.gov/opre/resource/fourth-national-incidence-study-of-child-abuse-and-neglect-nis-4-report-to. 3 W. Bradford Wilcox et al., Why Marriage Matters, Third Edition: Thirty Conclusions from the Social Sciences; Robert I. Lerman and W. Bradford Wilcox, “For Richer, For Poorer: How Family Structures Economic Success in America,” American Enterprise Institute & Institute for Family Studies, October 28, 2014, accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.aei.org/publication/for-richer-for-poorer-how-family-structures-economic-success-in-america/. 4 U.S. Census Bureau, “Poverty Status of Families, by Type of Family, Presence of Related Children, Race and Hispanic Origin,” Historical Poverty Tables Table 4, accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-poverty-people.html. 5 Future work from the Social Capital Project will address the question of the causal effects of growing up with married parents. 6 See Sara McLanahan, Laura Tach, and Daniel Schneider, “The Causal Effects of Father Absence,” Annual Review of Sociology 39 (2013), 399-427. This paper is a summary of the more sophisticated research that has been conducted since the mid-1990s. For a review of the earlier, less rigorous, literature, see Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 7 Wendy D. Manning and Pamela J. Smock, “New Families and Nonresident Father-Child Visitation,” Social Forces 78, no. 1(1999), 87-116; Wendy D. Manning and Pamela J. Smock, “’Swapping’ Families: Serial Parenting and Economic Support for Children,” Journal of Marriage and Family 62, no. 1(2000), 111-122. 8 For detailed methodologies used to produce the charts in this paper, see the Source Notes at the end of the paper. 9 Social Capital Project computations for 2005-2009 using the 2011-2013 and 2013-2015 National Survey of Family Growth. See the note to Figure 7 in the Source Notes at the end of this paper. 10 Sheela Kennedy and Steven Ruggles, “Breaking Up Is Hard to Count: The Rise of Divorce in the United States, 1980-2010,” Demography 51, no. 2(2014): 587-598, Figure 3, http://users.hist.umn.edu/~ruggles/Articles/breaking_up.pdf. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Advance Report of Final Divorce Statistics, 1989 and 1990, Monthly Vital Statistics Report 43(8), by Sally C. Clarke, March 22, 1995, “Divorces and Annulments and Rates: United States, 1940-90,” Table 1, accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/mvsr/supp/mv43_09s.pdf. 11 Social Capital Project computations. This conclusion is based on the trend in nonmarital pregnancies among childless women ages 15-29 leading to a first birth. See U.S. Census Bureau, Trends in Premarital Childbearing: 1930-1994, Current Population Reports, by Amara Bachu, October 1999, accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.census.gov/prod/99pubs/p23-197.pdf. These estimates ignore miscarriages, stillbirths, and abortions. Abortion was relatively rare before the early 1960s, involving perhaps 15 percent of pregnancies ending in birth or abortion by 1960. We estimate that abortions were 17 percent of conceptions that ended in birth or abortion in 1969. Computing this percentage requires estimates of the number of abortions and the number of births for the same group of women. We use an estimate of abortions that includes illegal abortions. See Willard Cates, “Legal Abortion: The Public Health Record,” Science 215, no. 4540(1982), 1586-1590, Table 1. Cates takes as his illegal abortion estimate the midpoint of a range estimated at a 1955 conference sponsored by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. See Mary S. Calderone, ed., Abortion in the United States (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958). This estimate is somewhat below the number implied by a 1968 study of central, urban North Carolina. See James R. Abernathy, Bernard G. Greenberg, and Daniel G. Horvitz, “Estimates of Induced Abortion in Urban North Carolina,” Demography 7, no. 1(1970), 19-29. We use estimated births from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Births: Final Data for 2014, National Vital Statistics Reports 64(12), by Brady E. Hamilton et al., December 23, 2015, “Births and birth rates, by race: United States, specified years 1940–1955 and each year, 1960–2014,” Table 1, accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_12.pdf. Finally, we divide abortions by the sum of abortions and births. 12 Social Capital Project computations. We use marital abortions and marital conceptions producing a birth for women ages 15-44 (see note to Figure 7 in the Source Notes at the end of this paper). The resulting abortion ratio differs from previously published estimates in that we exclude births following shotgun marriage from marital births. For trends in conventional abortion ratios by marital status, see Stanley K. Henshaw and Kathryn Kost, “Trends in the Characteristics of Women Obtaining Abortion, 1974 to 2004,” Guttmacher Institute, August 2008, Table 2, accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/trendswomenabortions-wtables.pdf. 13 Social Capital Project computations. In 1982, 65 percent of married women ages 15-44 were contracepters, a figure that rose to 71 percent by 1995 but that fell to 64 percent by the early 2010s. The number of 1982 contraceptive users is from William D. Mosher, “Contraceptive Practice in the United States, 1982-1988,” Family Planning Perspectives 22, no. 5 (1990), 198-205, Table 4. The number of 1995 contraceptive users is from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Current contraceptive use in the United States, 2006–2010, and changes in patterns of use since 1995, National Health Statistics Reports no. 60, by Jo Jones, William Mosher, and Kimberly Daniels, October 18, 2012, “Number of contracepting women aged 15–44 years and percent distribution of method used by age and marital status: United States, 1995 and 2006–2010,” Table 4, accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr060.pdf. The number of early 2010s contraceptive users is for 2011-2013, taken from, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Current Contraceptive Use and Variation by Selected Characteristics Among Women Aged 15-44: United States, 2011-2013, National Health Statistics Reports no. 86, by Kimberly Daniels, Jill Daugherty, Jo Jones, and William Mosher, November 10, 2015, “Number of women aged 15–44 currently using a method of contraception during month of interview and percent distribution, by method, according to marital or cohabiting status, parity, and intent to have more children: United States, 2002 and 2011–2013,” Table 4, accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr086.pdf. The number of married women ages 15-44 is from Social Capital Project analyses of data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey, accessed via the IPUMS-CPS website. See Sarah Flood, Miriam King, Steven Ruggles, and J. Robert Warren, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Current Population Survey: Version 5.0 [dataset], (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2017), accessed December 4, 2017, https://cps.ipums.org/cps/index.shtml. 14 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Recent Declines in Nonmarital Childbearing in the United States, Data Brief no. 162, by Sally C. Curtin, Stephanie J. Ventura, and Gladys M. Martinez, August 2014, accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db162.pdf. 15 Cynthia Osborn and Sara McLanahan, “Partnership Instability and Child Well-Being,” Journal of Marriage and Family 69, no. 4(2007), 1065-1083. 16 Among 15-19-year-olds, the share of women (including married teens) ever having had sex rose from 47 percent in 1982 to 53 percent in 1988. At that point, sexual activity among teens began a steady decline. Social Capital Project computations using Guttmacher Institute data on pregnancy rates overall and among the sexually experienced. See Guttmacher Institute, “Among women aged 15-19, rates of pregnancy, birth and abortion ratios; numbers of pregnancies, births, abortions and fetal losses; and population, 1973-2013,” Table 1.1, accessed December 4, 2017 https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/report_downloads/us-adolescent-pregnancy-trends-2013_tables.pdf. We divide pregnancies per 1,000 by pregnancies per 1,000 conditional on having had sex to get the share having had sex. 17 Ibid. and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Sexual Activity and Contraceptive Use Among Teenagers in the United States, 2011–2015, National Health Statistics Reports no. 104, by Joyce C. Abma and Gladys M. Martinez, June 22, 2017, “Percentage of never-married females and males aged 15–19 who have ever had sexual intercourse: United States, 2002, 2006–2010, and 2011–2015,” Table 1, accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr104.pdf. (See the Source Note for Figure 9 at the end of this paper.) The estimate for 18- and 19-year-olds is actually a five-year average from 2011-2015. Combining men and women, 48 percent of 20-year-olds had engaged in premarital sex between 1959 and 1968, compared to 65 percent between 1969 and 1978, 72 percent between 1979 and 1988, and 76 percent between 1989 and 1998. See Lawrence B. Finer, “Trends in Premarital Sex in the United States, 1954-2003,” Public Health Reports 122, no. 1(2007), 73-78. 18 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention, Division of STD Prevention, Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance 2015, October 2016, “Sexually Transmitted Diseases — Reported Cases and Rates of Reported Cases per 100,000 Population, United States, 1941–2015,” Table 1, “ accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.cdc.gov/std/stats15/STD-Surveillance-2015-print.pdf. 19 Social Capital Project analyses of General Social Survey microdata, 1988-2016. See Tom W. Smith, Peter V. Marsden, and Michael Hout, General Social Survey microdata, 1988-2016 [machine-readable data file], (Sponsored by National Science Foundation. NORC ed. Chicago: NORC at the University of Chicago) [producer and distributor]. 20 The number of women contracepting is from Mosher (1990) Table 4 and Daniels et al. (2015) Table 4, for 1982 and 2011-13, respectively. These estimates, both from the National Survey of Family Growth, are divided by the number of unmarried women ages 15-44, estimated from Social Capital Project analyses of data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey accessed via the IPUMS-CPS website (Flood et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Current Population Survey). 21 Social Capital Project analyses of General Social Survey microdata, 1988-2016 (Smith et al.) See also Jean M. Twenge, “Declines in Sexual Frequency among American Adults, 1989-2014,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 46, no. 8(2017), 2389-2401. 22 George H. Gallup, Jr., “Current Views on Premarital, Extramarital Sex,” Gallup, June 24, 2003, accessed December 4, 2017, http://www.gallup.com/poll/8704/current-views-premarital-extramarital-sex.aspx. 23 “Birth Control, Divorce Top List of Morally Acceptable Issues,” Gallup, June 8, 2016, accessed December 4, 2017, http://www.gallup.com/poll/192404/birth-control-divorce-top-list-morally-acceptable-issues.aspx. 24 General Social Survey, “Is it wrong to have sex before marriage?” accessed December 4, 2017, https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/trends/Gender%20&%20Marriage?measure=premarsx. 25 The “early 60s”estimate is for 1960-1964 and based on the 1982 National Survey of Family Growth. See William D. Mosher and Christine A. Bachrach, “First Premarital Contraceptive Use: United States, 1960-82,” Studies in Family Planning 18, no. 2(1987), 83-95. The “mid-80s” estimate is for 1983-1988 and based on the 1988 National Survey of Family Growth. See William D. Mosher and James W. McNally, “Contraceptive Use at First Premarital Intercourse: United States, 1965-1988,” Family Planning Perspectives 23, no. 3(1991), 108-116, Table 1. Women are asked retrospectively about the year they first had premarital sex and about which contraceptive methods were used. The most recent estimates are from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Use of Contraception in the United States: 1982–2008, Vital Health Statistics 23(29), August 2010, “Number of women aged 15–44 years whose first premarital sexual intercourse was after menarche, and percentage who used the specified contraceptive method at first intercourse, by selected characteristics: United States, 2006–2008,” Table 3, accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_23/sr23_029.pdf. 26 Social Capital Project calculations using previous studies. See Christine A. Bachrach, “Contraceptive Practice Among American Women, 1973-1982,” Family Planning Perspectives 16, no. 6(1984), 253-259, Table 1, and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Current Contraceptive Use in the United States, 2006–2010, and Changes in Patterns of Use Since 1995, National Health Statistics Reports no. 60, by Jo Jones, William Mosher, and Kimberly Daniels, October 18, 2012, “Current use of a method of contraception by women aged 15–44 years, all women, and women at risk of unintended pregnancy, by selected characteristics: United States, 2006–2010,” Table 3, accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr060.pdf. 27 Ibid. In addition, as discussed below, teen sexual activity rose through the 1980s and then remained elevated, but teen pregnancies declined. That decline must have been due to increased use of effective birth control. Indeed, pregnancies fell even more among sexually experienced teen women than among teen women generally. 28 U.S. Census Bureau, “Trends in Premarital Childbearing: 1930-1994.” 29 In 1974, around 44 percent of nonmarital pregnancies ended in abortion, compared with 52 percent in 1984. Excluding fetal deaths, the estimates were 49 percent in 1974, 58 percent in 1979, and 55 percent in 1984. Social Capital Project computations. See note to Figure 7 in the Source Notes at the end of this paper. 30 In 2009, around 31 percent of nonmarital pregnancies ended in abortion (compared with 44 percent in 1974). Social Capital Project computations. See note to Figure 7 in the Source Notes at the end of this paper. 31 The number of abortion providers nationally fell by 43 percent from 1982 to 2014, while the number of abortions declined by around 41 percent. On the change in abortion providers, see Lawrence B. Finer and Stanley K. Henshaw, “Abortion Incidence and Services In the United States in 2000,” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 35, no. 1(2003), 6-15, and Rachel K. Jones and Jenna Jerman, “Abortion Incidence and Service Availability in the United States, 2014,” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 49, no.1(2017), 17-27, Table 3. Number of abortions were computed by applying abortion rates to the number of women 15-44. Abortion rates are from Rachel K. Jones and Kathryn Kooistra, “Abortion Incidence and Access to Services in the United States, 2008,” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 43, no. 1(2011), 41-50, Table 1, and Jones and Jerman, “Abortion Incidence and Service Availability in the United States.” Number of women is from Social Capital Project analyses of data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey accessed via the IPUMS-CPS website (Flood et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Current Population Survey). 32 “Abortion,” Gallup, In Depth: Topics A to Z, accessed December 4, 2017, http://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx. 33 Social Capital Project analyses of General Social Survey microdata, 1988-2012 (Smith et al.). 34 Social Capital Project analyses. See note to Figure 7 in the Source Notes at the end of this paper. We estimate the figure at 48 percent in the late 2000s (compared with 49 percent in the early 1980s). Note that intended births from nonmarital pregnancies are a smaller share of nonmarital pregnancies—32 percent—because many unintended pregnancies end in abortion or a fetal death rather than in a birth. 35 Social Capital Project computations. This conclusion is based on the trend in nonmarital pregnancies among childless women ages 15-29 leading to a first birth. See U.S. Census Bureau, “Trends in Premarital Childbearing.” These estimates ignore miscarriages, stillbirths, and abortions. 36 Social Capital Project computations. See the note to Figure 15 in the Source Notes at the end of this paper. 37 Ibid. 38 This conclusion is in contrast to a new paper finding that liberalized abortion policy was central to changes in family formation. See Caitlin Knowles Myers, “The Power of Abortion Policy: Reexamining the Effects of Young Women’s Access to Reproductive Control,” Journal of Political Economy (forthcoming). We speculate that the difference has to do with the outcomes examined and the age ranges of women considered. Myers analyzes first marriages, first births, and shotgun marriages among women ages 15-22. 39 Social Capital Project computations. See the note to Figure 7 in the Source Notes at the end of this paper. Including miscarriage and stillbirths in pregnancies, the share ending in abortion in the early 1960s was 5 percent for married women and 29 percent for unmarried women, compared with 6 percent and 31 percent in the late 2000s. For our sensitivity analyses, we reestimated the 1960-1964 nonmarital and marital abortion ratios. For instance, instead of dividing the 1974 abortion ratio for nonmarried women to the 1974 abortion ratio of all women, and then applying that to the 1960-1964 abortion ratio, we used the 1979 abortion ratios for nonmarried and all women, which produced a smaller 1960-1964 nonmarital abortion ratio. We did the same to reestimate the 1960-1964 marital abortion ratio, but the difference was so small as to not affect our simulations. 40 Brink Lindsey, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture (New York: HarperBusiness, 2007); Abraham H. Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review 50, no. 4(1943), 370-396. 41 Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 42 Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, “The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women’s Career and Marriage Decisions,” Journal of Political Economy 110, no. 4(2002), 730-770; Martha J. Bailey, “More Power to the Pill: The Impact of Contraceptive Freedom on Women’s Life Cycle Labor Supply,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 121, no. 1(2006), 289-320. 43 Andrew M. Francis, “The Wages of Sin: How the Discovery of Penicillin Reshaped Modern Sexuality,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 42, no. 1(2013), 5-13. 44 George H. Gallup, Jr., “Current Views on Premarital, Extramarital Sex,” and “Birth Control, Divorce Top List of Morally Acceptable Issues,” Gallup. Similarly, General Social Survey data shows that in 1972, just 27 percent of adults said that having sex before marriage is “not wrong at all,” compared to 60 percent in 2016 who said that sex before marriage is “not wrong at all.” See General Social Survey, “Is it wrong to have sex before marriage?” 45 George A. Akerloff, Janet L. Yellen, and Michael L. Katz, “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 111, no. 2(1996), 277-317. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (New York: Basic Book, 1984). 50 Scott Winship, “Will Welfare Reform Increase Upward Mobility?” Forbes, March 26, 2015, accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottwinship/2015/03/26/will-welfare-reform-increase-upward-mobility/#176969c03354. 51 Paul Krugman, “When Values Disappear,” New York Times, March 11, 2015, accessed December 4, 2017, https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/when-values-disappear/; Jordan Weissman, “There Aren’t Enough Marriageable Men,” Slate, September 24, 2014, accessed December 4, 2017, http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/09/24/decline_of_marriage_pew_shows_there_aren_t_enough_marriageable_men.html; Alana Semuels, “When Factory Jobs Vanish, Men Become Less Desirable Partners,” The Atlantic, March 3, 2017, accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/03/manufacturing-marriage-family/518280/. 52 See the chart in Scott Winship, “Overstating the Costs of Inequality,” National Affairs, Spring 2013, accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/overstating-the-costs-of-inequality. 53 Scott Winship, “Declining Prime-Age Male Labor Force Participation: Why Demand- and Health-Based Explanations are Inadequate,” (Working Paper, Mercatus Center, 2017), accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/winship-labor-force-participation-mercatus-v1.pdf; Scott Winship, “Economic Opportunity and Trump’s Win,” Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, November 9, 2016, accessed December 4, 2017, https://freopp.org/economic-opportunity-and-trumps-win-88eef4be5eb1; Scott Winship, “Is the ‘Decline’ in Men’s Earnings Behind Marriage’s Demise?” Forbes, March 16, 2015, accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottwinship/2015/03/16/is-the-decline-in-mens-earnings-at-the-bottom-behind-marriages-demise/#d6b3dc14ec40. 54 Scott Winship, “What’s behind Declining Male Labor Force Participation: Fewer Good Jobs, or Fewer Men Seeking Them?” Mercatus Center, 2017, accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/winship_malelaborparticipation_mr_v2.pdf. 55 Winship, “Is the ‘Decline’ in Men’s Earnings Behind Marriage’s Demise?” , https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottwinship/2015/03/16/is-the-decline-in-mens-earnings-at-the-bottom-behind-marriages-demise/#d6b3dc14ec40. 56 See the research cited in W. Bradford Wilcox, “Don’t be a bachelor: Why married men work harder, smarter and make more money,” Washington Post, April 2, 2015, accessed December 4, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/04/02/dont-be-a-bachelor-why-married-men-work-harder-and-smarter-and-make-more-money/?utm_term=.c523b7e60993. 57 David T. Ellwood and Christopher Jencks, “The Uneven Spread of Single-Parent Families: What Do We Know? Where Do We Look for Answers?” in Social Inequality, ed. Kathryn M. Neckerman (New York: Russell Sage, 2004), 3-78; Melissa S. Kearney and Riley Wilson, “Male Earnings, Marriageable Men, and Nonmarital Fertility: Evidence from the Fracking Boom,” (Working Paper No. 23408, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2017), accessed December 4, 2017, http://www.nber.org/papers/w23408; Daniel T. Lichter, Diane K. McLaughlin, and David C. Ribar, “Economic Restructuring and the Retreat from Marriage,” Social Science Research 31, no. 2(2002), 230-256; Robert D. Mare and Christopher Winship, “Socioeconomic Change and the Decline of Marriage for Blacks and Whites,” in The Urban Underclass, eds. Christopher Jencks and Paul Peterson, (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1991), 175-202; Robert G. Wood, “Marriage Rates and Marriageable Men: A Test of the Wilson Hypothesis,” Journal of Human Resources 30, no. 1(1995), 163-193. | 1 | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z |