Why So Many Stars Are Getting Pregnant First And Married Later - If Then

Ebony, Sept, 2000 by Kelly Starling

It used to be every little girl's favorite rhyme. Pigtails flying, they would giggle as they jumped rope and teased each other about their latest crush:

   Tonya and Michael sittin' in a tree,
   k-i-s-s-i-n-g
   First comes love, then comes marriage
   Then comes Tonya with a baby carriage

Well, times have changed. That ideal may be the rule on the playground, but in Hollywood, and in cities across America, Tonya's carriage may come before her marriage, if there's a wedding at all. People are rewriting the lines and changing the way we think about family and commitment.

"People are exercising a lot of freedom about how they want to live with respect to marriage," says Beverly Guy-Sheftall, director of the women's center and Anna Julia Cooper professor of women's studies at Spelman College. "For generations, people used to get married without thinking about it. You got to be a certain age and it was something you were socialized to do. Today, people are realizing they have lots of choices. They are adopting children when they're single ... choosing to be parents without being lifetime partners."

Consider celebrity co-parents like Victoria Rowell and Wynton Marsalis, Angie Stone and D'Angelo, Erykah Badu and Andre (Dre) Benjamin of OutKast and longtime companions Kadeem Hardison and Chante Moore. They have all bucked tradition and started families on their own terms. Then there are newlyweds like Treach and Pepa, who had a baby first and later decided to jump the broom. Experts say they're part of a growing number of people who are letting their hearts rather than custom tell them when to wed.

Badu told EBONY in 1998 that her son, Seven Sirius, was her "love child." While she loves his father and he plays a principal role in the boy's life, she said she had no immediate plans to marry the man she calls "her beloved reflection." Back then, she and Benjamin shared a long-distance relationship, commuting between his Atlanta home and her native Dallas.

"It works really good for us ..." she told a reporter. "Maybe that's what has made this relationship last so long because we don't have to be up in each other's face all the time. Distance brings enchantment to the view."

But marriage or no marriage, the ethereal singer says she wants a houseful of children. "That's right, six more babies in five years," she said.

Badu is not alone in her thinking. A recent census report titled "Trends in Premarital Childbearing" revealed that more American women--not only teens but also older women--are conceiving babies without being married. Pursuit of higher education and career development and the increased acceptance of partners living together are some of the reasons for the rise.

"It's an index of the times so to speak," says Michael Eric Dyson, Ida B. Wells Barnett professor at DePaul University. "People are discovering that, in the case of couples, what sanctions the relationship is not the official seal of approval of the government or church but the mutual respect and love they have for each other."

It's not just women who are redefining the notion of family. Proud daddy and basketball star Shaquille O'Neal beams about his daughter, Taheara, saying, "The happiest I felt was the day my daughter was born," he told EBONY in December '98. "She's beautiful ..." "But in the same interview, he said he's not ready for marriage. "When you are married, you have to do everything right. I'm doing too many things right now to focus on a marriage full-time," he said. "Marriage is really hard."

Dyson says the high divorce rate of their peers and their parents makes Gen-Xers reluctant to plunge into marriage. The take-it-slow mentality, he says, can also be viewed as a critique of the nuclear family as the only acceptable model of family life.

"Black people have always developed alternative styles of being a family," says the Baptist minister and author of Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture. "Since marriage was outlawed in slavery, Black people always had to fall back on their own moral and spiritual resources to make do."

Having children outside of marriage is not a new concept for the Black community, says Guy-Sheftall. In the past, it may have been involuntary. But no matter the cause, the family pulled together and made sure the children were reared.

Some people today are choosing this lifestyle because they view traditional marriage as a form of hypocrisy, say some experts.

"Deep down in the core of our being as African people, some feel that American marriage is a farce," says Dr. Halford Fairchild, professor of psychology and Black studies at Pitzer College. "Legal marriage doesn't mean much in the context of a legal system that has turned its back on African people for hundreds of years. In the African community, we often have the take-it-or-leave-it attitude with respect to legal establishments."

Others question, however, whether that's the reasoning celebrities and others follow when they decide to have babies out of wedlock. Instead of thinking of the Motherland, many are thinking of themselves, says Dr. Julia Hare.