Family values and growth

National Review, Oct 5, 1992

THE Republican Party's preoccupation with moral issues has been portrayed as a politically inspired diversion from Topic A: the economy. A return to traditional family values could, however, help the economy more than the most potent growth package.

In 1991, for example, families headed by a woman with no husband present experienced a 5.4 per cent decline in real median income, to $16,692. This was much worse than the 1.4 per cent drop--to $40,995--in income of families headed by a married couple.

Although the poverty rate rose in 1991 to 14.1 per cent--the highest level since 1983--the rate for married-couple families remained unchanged, at 6 per cent. By contrast, the percentage of female-headed families living in poverty increased significantly, from 33.4 in 1990 to 35.6 in 1991.

Health, especially that of children, is also highly correlated with family structure. The mortality rate of babies born to unmarried white women in 1989 stood at 13.1 deaths per 1,000 single births, compared to 7.8 deaths per 1,000 single births to married white mothers. Among blacks, the comparable infant-mortality rates were 19.6 and 14.6 per 1,000 single births, respectively. Regardless of the race, age, or income of its mother, a child is more likely to die in infancy if born out of wedlock. Even a mother's education matters less than her marital status: infant-mortality rates are higher for children of unmarried mothers who are college graduates than of married high-school dropouts.

A sharp rise in out-of-wedlock births has occurred in most industrialized nations, with Japan the notable exception (see table). Male joblessness has been blamed for this trend in the U.S., although this fails to explain why both illegitimacy and divorce rates continued rising during the prosperous Sixties and Eighties. The rise in the percentage of wives who work outside the home and the rise in wage rates paid to women relative to men has also been implicated in the rise in female-headed families.

In the U.S., however, the decline of the traditional family increasingly reflects a deliberate choice to accept single parenthood. During the early Sixties (1960-64), 52.2 per cent of unmarried women 15 to 34 years old who were pregnant with their first child married before the child was born. By 1985-89, the percentage had fallen by nearly half, to 26.6.

The ready availability of AFDC, Medicaid, and other welfare programs targeted to fatherless families undoubtedly explains much of this trend. But welfare cannot explain the sharp rise in illegitimacy among never-married white women over 24 years of age. At least some of them are choosing an untraditional remedy for the ticking away of their "biological clock."

More than half (55 per cent) of these Murphy Browns reported in 1988 that they deliberately set out to conceive a child at the time of their pregnancy-up from just 16 per cent in 1982. By contrast, only 44 per cent of the unmarried black mothers age 25 and over had intended to get pregnant.

PERCENTAGE OF BIRTHS TO UNMARRIED
   WOMEN IN SELECTED COUNTRIES
             1960   1970   1980    1989
U.S.         5.3    10.7   18.4    27.1
Canada       4.3    9.6    12.8    23.0
France       6.1    6.8    11.4    28.2
W. Germany   6.3    5.5     7.6    10.2
Japan        1.2    0.9     0.8     1.0
Sweden      11.3   18.4    39.7    51.8
U.K.         5.2    8.0    11.5    26.6