"For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage"

"For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage".

A fascinating statistic, even if the only thing really and truly accurate about the article IS the title.

Still, it is useful for discussion purposes... especially when taking on the Childless-Elitist-Liberals that are exiting the World, stage left, for their own poor reproductive history.

Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.

Well, the big lie here is the lie of omission. Roughly 1/3 of women college graduates leave their childbearing years childless, and that unfortunate statistic amplifies the relative incidence in the non-college grad truncate. You see, "fastest growth" was not in absolute births, but fastest growing percentage... well, if the other (college grad) truncate (there are only 2 here.... college grad women and non-college grad women) birthrate declines... the other truncate could quite possibly have had fewer births than their historical average, and still be the "faster growing". Of course, that's was not explained nor even mentioned... after all this is the NYT and they are playing to their audience - highly educated, but for the most part innumerate, middle aged and just plain aged Liberals with either 0 or 1 child (the binary ode of Liberalism, and the equation that assures their end in the very near future) (and when I say these people are "innumerate" I am not trying to be insulting nor am I alleging these people cannot run a calculator or even perform some simple algebra... they can. What they do not seem to be able to do is make the connections between the numbers... if they could, they would have seen the silliness of the assertions and conclusions (and confusions) of this article from a mile away).

Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 — is both a symbol of the transforming family and a hint of coming generational change.

While it is fair to say that a generational change is under way, I don't think the article emphasizes the critical point - 2/3 of of children are born to mother's under 30 - and the data point they really don't want to stir up: That 90% of children are born to women 34 and younger. What is up with the 30 cut off? 34 is  far better for our purposes here, because the births after that are the 3rd and 4th births of mommy-mommies, or the first births of the petri-dish mommies... and they are only 10% of births.

This, too, is disingenuous: "Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children." If just 10% of women who have a child out of wedlock before 30 subsequently marry and have a child or children... see why there are 3 kinds of lies? Mine, yours, and statistics?

Here's where it gets good:

One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education.

Yes, college graduates overwhelming marry before having their only child... when they have children (child), which is only 2/3 of the time (it is over 90% for the other truncate)... and here is where it gets rich... Educated men have eschewed marrying women that cannot make a living on their own because of the penalties they have suffered at the hands of our outrageous divorce laws. A male professional making $300k per year might have taken on a woman of lower social and educational standing in generations past... no more. These men won't even marry a woman with student loans! Nope, there are a great many fewer suckers out there for the divorce bar to sink its teeth into... educated men now prefer to put off marriage, marrying only other professionals/educated women that can make a living... and even then doing so only with the benefit of a 95 page pre-nuptial agreement... and the great unintended consequence of this is that the women in the non-grad truncate, who still wish to have children, now have even less leverage than they had when marriage was "unfair" to women prior to the Feminist lobby. But they still have children.

And back to the 1/3 of college grads leaving their childbearing years childless... this is likely not by choice... fertility goes down like a rock in a pond for women in their early 30's... right about the time these women have established a career after under grad and grad school. In fact, if one wanted their family line to end with their daughters, there is no better strategy (short of murder) than to send them off to college.

“Marriage has become a luxury good,” said Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Sorry, Frank... marriage is fast becoming an obsolete good, not a luxury good, and the only guys who are willing to step into the maw are those with a bride that can make a living.

The shift is affecting children’s lives. Researchers have consistently found that children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems.

Wow! You don't say!  This comes squarely under the "No Shit, Sherlock" rubric. But who cares about children? This is ALL about empowering women!

The forces rearranging the family are as diverse as globalization and the pill. Liberal analysts argue that shrinking paychecks have thinned the ranks of marriageable men, while conservatives often say that the sexual revolution reduced the incentive to wed and that safety net programs discourage marriage.

Liberal analysts argued that? Where, exactly? No doubt some Feminazi suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder (but that's from the department of redundancy department, isn't it?).  I would have had a field day with that assertion. Much as I despise the Right, they got it goin' on here.

Here in Lorain, a blue-collar town west of Cleveland where the decline of the married two-parent family has been especially steep, dozens of interviews with young parents suggest that both sides have a point. 

Over the past generation, Lorain lost most of two steel mills, a shipyard and a Ford factory, diminishing the supply of jobs that let blue-collar workers raise middle-class families. More women went to work, making marriage less of a financial necessity for them. Living together became routine, and single motherhood lost the stigma that once sent couples rushing to the altar. Women here often describe marriage as a sign of having arrived rather than a way to get there. 

Meanwhile, children happen. 

Amber Strader, 27, was in an on-and-off relationship with a clerk at Sears a few years ago when she found herself pregnant. A former nursing student who now tends bar, Ms. Strader said her boyfriend was so dependent that she had to buy his cigarettes. Marrying him never entered her mind. “It was like living with another kid,” she said. 

When a second child, with a new boyfriend, followed three years later — her birth control failed, she said — her boyfriend, a part-time house painter, was reluctant to wed.

Other than the "Meanwhile, children happen" thing this was pretty much a waste of copy space and designed to take the reader's mind of the silly assertion above that Liberal's made about thinning paychecks... except one thing. The last line, about how her boy-friend was reluctant to wed.

Reluctant? If men are not BEATEN to the alter, they do not go. And even then, the bride ain't going to be a bride unless she has an education and can make a living. All men knows what happens to men in divorce court when the wife has no marketable skills. Courts don't impoverish them... they impoverish the man. All markets react rationally over time... and the market for grooms reacted rationally.

 Ms. Strader likes the idea of marriage; she keeps her parents’ wedding photo on her kitchen wall and says her boyfriend is a good father. But for now marriage is beyond her reach.
“I’d like to do it, but I just don’t see it happening right now,” she said. “Most of my friends say it’s just a piece of paper, and it doesn’t work out anyway.”

Doesn't work out anyway? Really? Why would it? Absent a pre-nup, women married to men of wealth have overwhelming incentive to get paid and not fulfill obligations - there simply is no other gig like this in the entire, freaking world. And if the groom ain't making enough? No reason to stay with this bum, he let me down. Almost 75% of divorce filings are files by women because of the disastrous incentives of our peculiar family laws.

The recent rise in single motherhood has set off few alarms, unlike in past eras. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a top Labor Department official and later a United States senator from New York, reported in 1965 that a quarter of black children were born outside marriage — and warned of a “tangle of pathology” — he set off a bitter debate.

 And boy was ol' Danny Boy Moynihan right...