The XX Factor: What women really think.

Unwed Mothers, Unpacked

Emily Y, you're right about the large number of women who are having babies outside of marriage. In 1960, 5 percent of kids were born to unmarried mothers. Now the rate is about 40 percent. That is certainly a broad cultural shift, over a couple of generations. But unmarried doesn't necessarily mean single as in all by yourself. University of Michigan sociologist Pamela Smock has shown that as many as half of unmarried mothers live with the fathers of their children when those kids are born. That doesn't mean those relationships are long-term and stable—compared with marriage, they are less so. But the data paint a different picture, I think, than the one we usually see when we think single mom.

As for whether to recommend single motherhood by choice, Bonnie, this one to me is part of what I was puzzling over the other day, about audience. Most unmarried mothers are low-income and young and haven't gone to college. They're the people for whom unwed motherhood is an engine of social inequality, as Emily aptly put it. That's the main story, in terms of the numbers, and so we should have our eye on it. But then there is the much smaller—but growing much more rapidly—group of Murphy Browns: single mother by choice who have gone to college, make good money, and for one reason or another don't find husbands but in their 30s decide to have kids anyway. When I hung out with some of those moms for a magazine piece earlier this year, I was struck by their autonomy. (Their kids were adopted or sperm babies, so no dads in the picture.) I'm not suggesting we design policy around this much smaller group. But the framework for their choices is simply different from the framework of a 20-year-old who has no clear way to support herself and her kid. Whether growing up without a father, to get back to that point you raised Emily, is just as difficult no matter what other resources your family has—that's a hard and big question.