LOS ANGELES, June 27 (UPI) -- Nearly 40 years ago, Johnson administration adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a controversial report in which he decried the birth rate among unwed black women.
At that time, that segment of the U.S. population represented about 22 percent of the births among African Americans. Since then the figured increased dramatically and, while it has moderated according to recent government data, the birth rate for unwed women for the overall United States is more than 1.5 times the figure that concerned Moynihan.
Moynihan, later a respected U.S. senator from New York, cited the relatively high birth rate for unwed black women as a sign of deterioration of the traditional black family and said these "unstable" situations have severe consequences, including a dependence on social programs.
His report -- "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" -- stated that while the black middle-class had managed "to save itself," "vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated. There are indications that the situation may have been arrested in the past few years, but the general post-war trend is unmistakable. So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself."
Certainly sociological changes have removed the social stigma of an unmarried woman having a child, making it easier for the woman to be a contributing member of society. But that is not always the case and the increase in the overall birth rate among unwed women is still widely viewed as a crucial marker of social problems. University of Utah anthropologist Henry Harpending told United Press International, "I don't think that high levels of fatherlessness are compatible with modern technological society for long."
The government data showed the proportion of children born to unmarried women is increasing in the overall population, according to the National Vital Statistics System. The U.S. percentage of new mothers who were unwed hit 33.8 percent in 2002, up from 33.5 percent in 2001. That compares to 18 percent in 1980 and 8 percent when Moynihan wrote his report.
American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray, author of the influential 1984 book "Losing Ground," which helped launched the welfare-reform movement, said, "Illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of our time -- more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare or homelessness because it drives everything else."
"The Moynihan report spawned a cottage industry of studies of father-absent families," noted Harpending. Such families were shown to "yield sons with sharply reduced quantitative and spatial abilities, mildly increased verbal abilities, who had difficulty with pair bonding. They were much more likely to divorce, and relative to controls, they lacked drive or ambition."
Harpending was one of the first to focus attention on the impact on daughters. "Father-absent girls have higher rates of illegitimate pregnancy, earlier and more sex, higher divorce rates." He theorized that young women develop expectations about men from whether their father was a "dad or a cad." If their father was a faithful provider, they will tend to hold out for a man who lives up to that standard, he said. When they do, that encourages young men to behave in socially responsible ways.
When young women fail to ask much of young men, Harpending argued, this in turn leads to antisocial behavior in not just their children, but in their kids' fathers as well.
Indeed, the birth rate among unmarried non-Hispanic whites (22.9 percent in 2002, up from 22.5 percent the previous year) is higher than that 22 percent black rate of four decades ago. By way of contrast, the white birth rate among unmarried women was 16.9 percent in 1990, and 1.9 percent in 1956.
In a much-discussed 1993 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Murray predicted that the rise in births among unwed whites would lead to a "coming white underclass." He told UPI this week, "Essentially, affluent white Americans think of truck drivers and supermarket clerks as the lowest rung on the white socio-economic ladder, and have no idea of the size of the white population that works sporadically, doesn't marry and commits a lot crime. Living in rural America, I see more of that population than most of my fellow 'cognitive eliters,' but all my data are anecdotes."
The highest birth rates among unwed whites are found in certain rural states such as Maine (33 percent), a state that has quietly developed a lot of social problems in recent years. Vermont, West Virginia and Indiana follow Maine on the list.
Although Hispanics are widely considered morally traditionalist, their rate of birth to unmarried parents is almost midway between the white and black rates. It grew to 43.4 percent in 2002, up from 42.5 percent in 2001 and 37.6 percent in 1990, the first year the government kept separate statistics on the Hispanic category.
Although the rate of births among black unwed mothers -- 68 percent according to the latest data -- is higher, because Latinos have more children than blacks, there are almost as many children born to unwed Hispanics (379,000 in 2002) as to blacks (402,000). The largest number of children is still born to unmarried non-Hispanic whites (528,000), but if current trends continue, Hispanics will account for the largest number of children born to unwed parents.
Using 1997 data, an NVSS study released in 2001 showed the underlying patterns of the three main groups. The frequency of pregnancies among unwed blacks (167 per 1,000 unmarried women per year) and unwed Latinos (166) were virtually the same, almost three times the white unmarried pregnancy rated (58). Unwed blacks had the most abortions (74), followed by Hispanics (57) and whites (23).
The birth rate for unwed Hispanics born in the United States (48 percent in 2000) is notably higher than it is for Hispanic immigrants born in Latin America (39 percent). This suggests that the overall Latino rate of birth by unwed mothers will continue to rise as the children of today's immigrants assimilate to urban American norms.
Among Hispanics, Puerto Ricans have the highest percentage of babies born to unwed mothers, while Cubans have the lowest. The largest Latino group, Mexicans, is about average compared with the overall U.S. population.
Northeast Asians have the lowest birth rate among unwed couples in America, with both Chinese and Japanese being under 10 percent in 2000, the latest year for which data on Asians are available.
Arthur Hu, who maintains one of the largest Web pages of the statistical information on Asian Americans, notes that the low rates of births among unwed Asian women may be one of the most important "secrets" to the so-called myth of the model minority.
These figures also correlated with higher rates of marriage and living as extended families, low rates of divorce, births delayed until after careers are established, low rates of infant mortality and low rates of drug, alcohol or tobacco use while pregnant, even among the poor.
Birth rates among unwed women differ dramatically by state -- from 17 percent in Utah in 2002 to 56 percent in the District of Columbia. The next highest states are Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Mexico (all 47 percent). Among American dependencies, the highest unwed motherhood rate is found in the inaptly named Virgin Islands -- 68 percent.
On the other hand, the black rate in Hawaii is extraordinarily low -- 18.5 percent in 2002, barely higher than the state's white rate of 17.3 percent.
This illustrates that nowhere do blacks and whites behave more similarly than in the Aloha State. For example, the results of the National Assessment of Educational Performance tests for fourth- and eighth-grade reading were released last month, and the narrowest black-white test score gaps were found in Hawaii.
This level of equality is probably due to a large fraction of Hawaii's small black community having ties to the armed services, where a high degree of racial similarity is on display.
Most of the other states with low black rates of single parenthood are in cold weather regions like Idaho (33 percent), where the number of blacks is small and they are well integrated into the mainstream community and its norms of behavior. Similarly, in these almost all white states, blacks are much more likely to marry interracially than in states with large black communities.
The highest percentage of black unwed mothers is in Wisconsin (82 percent). Wisconsin is followed by the District of Columbia (77 percent).
In sharp contrast, Washington has the lowest non-Hispanic white birth rate of unwed women (8 percent). Next are Utah and New Jersey (both 13 percent).
Long the butt of jokes, New Jersey has emerged in recent years as one of the wealthiest, best educated and most respectable of all states. Although New Jersey is popularly associated with white crime families like HBO's "The Sopranos," a 2001 study found that the imprisonment rate of its white population was the second lowest in the nation.
The rates of births by unwed women are highest in states with heavily Puerto Rican or Dominican populations, such as Connecticut (62 percent).
Murray somberly summed up his views on why media concern over single parenthood seems to have declined even while it hits a record level nationally, saying it is because the "underclass has dropped out of sight -- because it's no longer in our face. They don't bother us like they used to."
