There's an interesting argument put here in Slate as to why there are more single mothers these days:
The dynamics among abstinence, abortion, contraception, and the decline of marriage are complex, but here we’ll give the short version of an argument that we’ve made in various law-review articles and will continue to make in our forthcoming book, Family Classes. We think the big story of the past 40 years is the disappearance of the shotgun marriage. The shotgun marriage used to hide nonmarital pregnancies. It has disappeared not because of abortion, but because it didn’t work. The shotgun marriage kept couples together only when women had no ability to leave. The sexual brinkmanship of the 1950s (as teens discovered the car and lovers’ lanes) increased the number of brides pregnant at the altar to highs last seen in the 18th century and fueled the divorce revolution of the 1970s. Douthat is right that a young woman with a promising future preferred the security of the pill and abortion to early marriage to a man who happened to get her pregnant. He refers to a perceptive study by economists George Akerlof and Janet Yellen that observed that once women took charge of their own reproductive futures, men no longer had to “volunteer” to marry the women they had impregnated. The economists, however, were referring to the combined effect of abortion and the pill; a more recent study by economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz found that, between the two, contraception was a key development in the norm shift that began with college graduates. Douthat leaves that part out.
All of this, however, is so 1980s. In the era Akerlof and Yellen studied, men no longer had to propose to women who, after all, had the option of using contraception and had failed to do so. Something different is taking place today: The “Bristol effect” is that the women reject the men who do propose, and then they still have the child. They do so because marriage is no longer a good deal for women with more reliable incomes than the men in their lives. Blue-collar wages flatlined for white men in the ’90s (and did so a generation earlier for black men). During the same period, blue-collar jobs generally become much less stable. The men became less reliable earners at a time when women’s workforce opportunities continue to increase. And while wages alone do not determine marriage, the behavior that often accompanies the lack of a steady job is a turnoff. These trends had already begun in the ’80s for the worst-off portions of the population, but they accelerated for most of the working class in the ’90s.
So the issue is not whether we are going to use anti-abortion sentiment to bring back the scarlet letter. Certainly, not with Bristol celebrated on reality TV. Instead, the question is whether we are going to face up to the challenge of caring for the children who result and the pretense that abstinence can cure the problem.
In the Kansas heartland, the single moms we meet are in tears because the same politicians who oppose abortion are cutting health care and education funding, raising taxes on the poor to finance income tax cuts for the wealthy, and eviscerating protections that had helped keep single mothers employed. Let’s recognize that the celebration of the unintended birth comes with an obligation to care for all our children.Certainly, the shotgun wedding has been around a long time, if some examples from my mother's family are anything to go by. In fact, what went on in her rural, working class family in the 1930's and 40's dispels any idea that people held back from pre-marital sex at a time where contraception was extremely limited and - I presume - abortion in country towns was not readily available.
The funny thing is, as far as I could see, the marriages that happened quickly due to pregnancy turned out to be long and pretty happy looking ones. I don't really know why that should be - the economic arguments about stable jobs and income noted in the article above seems at first a bit improbable to me. (It makes it sound like women are more into hard nosed calculations about what's best for them financially than I would have assumed.) But then again, we are talking about marriages in the 40's and 50's to men with blue collar but long lasting and stable jobs, and limited opportunities for the women to make a good living. (They also would have had to take much time off to raise children, as child care was not generally available like it is now.) So, you could say, economics and limited options forced them into marriages. That sounds unfortunate, except for the fact that they turned out to be happy enough, long term marriages. Arranged marriages are also often quite successful. And there was that recent report about a study showing that people routinely underestimate how much they will change in the future.
Of course, you can't credibly argue that women should go back to having less options, both economically and in terms of contraception.
But what about the attitude that children will likely be happiest - and have the best life outcomes - when being raised with the stability of two parents who will be together for the long term? Why does that have to get lost in the matter of more choice for adults?
And speaking of choices and consequences: no one is going to put the genie back in the bottle of relatively reliable contraception encouraging fertile people into sexual relationships that are seen as convenient and experimental. (In the sense that, at the start, people are not sure whether it would work long term.) But the fact is, no contraception is 100% reliable, and if (unlike your grandparents) you cannot bear the idea of making a decision to live for the next 20 years with your bedroom partner if one of you falls pregnant, then you really should not be having the ongoing sexual relationship in the first place. And besides which, stop panicking about how unhappy you might be if a partnering decision is made in circumstances not entirely within your control.*
Well, that's how it seems to me anyway. Kind of simple, really, yet I have a great deal of trouble seeing what's wrong with thinking that way.
* Of course, people will say I am taking no account of safe abortion as an option now in most Western countries. The thing is, I am cynical about the number of not entirely committed relationships which actually survive an abortion decision. I know that anti-abortion groups almost certainly exaggerate the psychological harm that abortion causes, but looking at some pro-choice pages, it seems most studies concentrate solely on how it affects women, and not so much on how it affects relationships in the long term.
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