Demographic Trends
Nonmarital fertility has increased substantially in both Europe and the USA. Official statistics for the USA suggest that, as of 1998, roughly one in three births (32.8 percent) were to unmarried women, a level about three times higher than that in 1970, at which time one in ten births (10.7 percent) were to unmarried women. These levels are mirrored in much of Europe. More than every third birth occurs outside marriage in France, the UK, Finland, and the former East Germany, and roughly every second birth is nonmarital in the Scandinavian countries of Iceland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (Kiernan 2001).
In the USA, nonmarital first births have been and continue to be prevalent among teenage women; however, the composition of nonmarital births (counting all parities) increasingly consists of those at higher birth orders to nonteenage women. As of the early 1990s, second and higher-order nonmarital births accounted for 48 percent of births to unmarried white women and fully 60 percent of births to unmarried black women. Nonmarital fertility in the USA has also increased substantially among women over age 19. In 1970, one-half of all nonmarital births were to teenage women, but by the early 1990s, nonmarital births to women aged 20 and older accounted for more than two-thirds of all nonmarital births. These period trends have been accompanied by marked declines in the likelihood of marriage following a nonmarital first birth, with some attributing this decline in marriage to changes in men’s economic circumstances and others to period change in both men’s and women’s economic circumstances.
Nonmarital fertility in the USA continues to exhibit striking differentials by race and ethnicity. In 1998, slightly more than one in four white births (26.3 percent) were nonmarital, while nearly seven in ten black births (69.0 percent) were nonmarital. These differences also extend to births in cohabiting unions. Births to cohabiting white women rose sharply in the last two decades of the twentieth century, accounting for virtually all of the observed increases in white nonmarital fertility (Bumpass and Lu 2000). By contrast, births to cohabiting black women accounted for a far smaller proportion of nonmarital black births. Fewer than one out of five of recent nonmarital births occurred to cohabiting black women and, over time, births within cohabiting unions have constituted a declining fraction of nonmarital births to black women (Wu et al. 2001).
