COLUMN ONE : Taking the Solo Road to Motherhood : More women are opting to be single parents. They say they’re not mocking fatherhood, as Dan Quayle suggests; they just can’t find a guy they like.

Like every other girl she knew growing up, Karen Logue always meant to get married and have a family--but the right man never came along.

By the age of 33, Logue decided to forgo what she could not control, marriage, and pursue what she could, motherhood. Now, after $18,000 in fees for failed artificial inseminations and at least $12,500 invested in an adoption, the Rancho Santa Margarita assembly worker finally has what she wants: a baby. And if the finances work out, she’ll have another.

“It’s worth everything,” she said.

While Vice President Dan Quayle complains that single mothers are “mocking the importance of fathers,” more women such as Logue are choosing single motherhood not because they believe fathers are irrelevant but, they say, because they can’t find one they like.

“We all would much rather be married in a good solid family than to do this by ourselves,” said nurse Barbara Fryer Stock, 40, founder of the 25-member Orange County chapter of Single Mothers by Choice. “But just because we’re not, it doesn’t mean we can’t do it.”

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the number of single women giving birth rose from 665,746 in 1980 to 1.1 million in 1989. The increase is greatest among older, white women who are quickly closing the gap with black women, who have the highest rates of giving birth while single. Between 1980 and 1989, the birth rate for single white women between the ages of 30 and 34 rose 93%, and it rose 91% for those ages 35 to 39.

For every woman who chooses single motherhood, there are four more who think about it, said Jane Mattes, founder of New York-based Single Mothers by Choice, which says it has 1,600 members in a dozen chapters.

“This is a radical, radical idea in any society,” said University of Washington sociologist Pepper Schwartz, author of “American Couples.” “Marriage has been the kinship group that most societies have used to guarantee order and responsibility to child raising. We are now saying the essential unit is mother and child.”

The intentional disruption of the traditional family disturbs many thinkers, liberal and conservative alike. In addition to the problem of single mothers, they cite a variety of social ills caused by absent fathers. Sociologists speculate that men spend more time living apart from families than at any other time in American history, a phenomenon some link to rising rates of adult male crime as well as delinquency and pregnancy among youths.

“You don’t want to unnecessarily trample people’s choice and people’s rights,” said Rutgers sociologist David Popenoe, co-chair of the Council on Families in America, which studies the disintegration of traditional families. “On the other hand, social norms and values are very important for society to uphold. We and other modern societies are drifting toward a situation where the male becomes more and more superfluous. . . . It’s a trend that is very, very dangerous.”

It is unclear how mothers who deliberately conceive outside marriage may be affecting their children. In some cases, children of single mothers may be better off than those raised in troubled two-parent homes, or if they are raised by middle-class mothers they may be better off than children raised in poverty.

Yet, without a known father they may be forced to grapple with their own identities and how to explain their existence to others.

“It is an absolutely open question,” said New York social worker Naomi Miller, author of “Single Parents by Choice,” to be published this fall by Insight Books. “We’re watching history taking place in the arena of the family.

“Maybe this will come to be regarded as something of an additional way of raising children as most of America has come to accept premarital sex,” Miller said. “Or it will continue to be viewed as a deviation. We won’t know for 10, 20 years.”

For the women--mostly educated, professional women over 30--it is often an agonizing choice of last resort, made after years of searching for a husband. If they find the pool of marriageable men shrinking, there is good reason, therapists said.

“We have a society full of men who are not really interested in being fathers,” said Atlanta psychiatrist and family therapist Frank Pittman, author of “Men Without Models,” to be published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons next year.

“Men used to evaluate their worth, their character, their virtue in terms of how they did as family men,” Pittman said. “Now we have men out there either feeling like such failures they don’t have a position in family life, or men who are so caught up in pursuit of their success they think family life is beneath them.”

Based on experience and what they see down the road, even some young women are pursuing single motherhood.

“What if the right man doesn’t happen until you’re 50 or 60? You have to play with the numbers,” said Beverly Schneider, 36, a Los Angeles computer specialist who deliberately conceived with a boyfriend when she was 28. He was upset when she told him and she hasn’t seen him since, she said.

“I didn’t feel like waiting anymore,” Schneider said. “I found a lot of quality men, but they didn’t want to be husbands or fathers. If I had to choose, I’d choose motherhood. Men were unreliable in my life. I thought I’d choose the reliable one.”

Schneider was anxious about breaking with her traditional, middle-class Jewish background, and she worried how the lack of a father would affect her child’s emotional and psychological development, she said. “My motivation for having a child ironically is that I am traditional. Home and family life are more important to me than a career. . . .

“Everybody around me seemed to believe that someday, someday soon in fact, I’d be married and I’d get what I want and live the life I want. I came to realize that although other people were well meaning, they didn’t know anymore how my life was going to turn out than I did. I felt very strongly I didn’t want to leave it to chance.”

At first her family and co-workers were shocked. “I found a lot of people who I didn’t know well who would say to me, ‘Who’s the father?’ I said, ‘That’s a private question and I don’t care to answer that.’ ”

Her daughter is 7. “I have explained to her that we do have an unusual lifestyle. It’s not the regular kind of family that most people have. I said, ‘In the old days, a lot of people used to think it was wrong for a woman to have children if she were not married.’ She said, ‘You’re a mommy and I’m a kid. How could it be wrong?’ ”

Until recently, it was unthinkable for middle-class women to have a child outside marriage.

Thirty years ago, the child would have been given up for adoption, said Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin. “Fifteen years ago, it would have been retained, but with considerable shame and guilt,” he said. “Now, it’s at least tolerated, if not accepted.”

As more women entered the job market and began to earn higher wages, marriage for economic survival became less of a necessity. As a result, Cherlin said, women may have developed higher standards for husbands.

Mattes insists that any of the women in her group could marry if they wanted to. “It’s not that hard to get married. The question is, who is that someone? It’s a matter of women being choosier and less willing to force a marriage that may or may not be the right one for them.”

A survey of her group’s membership showed that 98% would have preferred to raise their child in a good marriage. “You have to note the word good ,” she said.

The mothers say they and their children blend easily into a world that is replete with an array of families formed through divorce or remarriage.

Nearly one in four children in the United States is born outside of marriage and the divorce rate is among the world’s highest. More than twice as many households are headed by divorced, separated or never-married people than those in traditional families. Mothers who are single by choice say they are only the latest branch on society’s changing family tree.

But Quayle’s remarks and the furor they touched off revealed a society that has not yet come to grips with the upheaval in family forms over the past 25 years.

Some critics contend that mothers who are single by choice are selfishly fulfilling their own desires for a “lifestyle choice” at the expense of their children.

“If a woman is married and wants a child she’s not considered selfish. Many times a single woman, if she wants to have a child, is considered selfish,” said Pat Scott, 45, a program analyst from Orange who became impregnated with donor sperm from the Southern California Infertility Center. “You agonize to make sure it’s a healthy decision for your child as well as yourself. It’s not a decision any woman makes lightly.”

Karen Logue, one of six children in a family split by a bitter divorce, believes it is better to be raised in a happy single-parent home than an unhappy dual-parent home. She has lost faith in finding an ideal marriage. “It’s hard trusting people these days,” she said.

Raising children alone, whether planned or not, remains controversial.

While fathers may not be essential to raising happy, successful children, there is little dispute--among liberals or conservatives--that good fathers in harmonious families are preferred.

A 1990 survey from the National Center for Health Statistics found an “alarmingly high” prevalence of emotional and behavior problems among all children, with rates two to three times higher for single-parent and stepparent families than for intact families.

Some argue that the only problem with single motherhood is the lack of money, but others, such as Popenoe of the Council on Families, believe men and women bring different, valuable skills to child rearing. He said it is more difficult for mothers to discipline, control and guide the behavior of their sons. Fatherlessness is probably the single most important factor in the rising juvenile delinquency rate, Popenoe said.

The risk for girls in fatherless homes is premature sexuality and later divorce, said Pittman, author of “Men Without Models.” The girls “both overvalue and distrust men so they have great difficulty with relationships with men,” he said.

How a child came to be fatherless also plays into the equation. In several studies comparing fatherlessness because of divorce and death, children were much better off if their father had died. Children of deceased fathers retain an idealized view of their father while they may be plagued by feelings of guilt and abandonment in a divorce, Popenoe said.

“There is no information on when the child simply doesn’t have a clue” about his father, Popenoe said.

Kathy Warmington, 41, a Costa Mesa secretary, was raised by a single mother, a widow, and says she would not inflict it on another. Because of her longing for a father, she responded to the attentions of an older family friend who wound up sexually abusing her, she said.

She remains unmarried and childless. “I know you can adopt if you’re single. I wouldn’t do it, having grown up in a one-parent family. I don’t think I’d subject a child to that. A child needs a mother and a father.”

On the other hand, there is evidence that single parents, mothers and fathers, can raise healthy, fully functioning children.

Studies on singles who adopt children show that children fare well if the mother is stable and can create a good support system, said Miller, author of “Single Parents by Choice.” But the phenomenon of parents deciding to conceive outside marriage is so new that there have been no studies completed.

While the single mothers value their choice to have children, they are among the first to agree that it is a hard road to travel alone. They do not necessarily recommend it.

Older women are sometimes shocked by the demands on their time and fading energy. Stock said: “Sometimes, God, you get home from work, you do all the stuff with the kid, cooking dinner, homework, washing diapers or laundry, all the stuff you would do in a traditional relationship, then when you get the child to bed, it’s like there’s no energy for you.

“And it’s expensive to raise a kid by yourself.”

Mothers who are intentionally single said they are trying to find replacement male role models for their children in grandfathers, uncles or friends with whom they share outings and holidays.

“Kids need male role models but they don’t necessarily have to be the father,” Stock said.

Among the mothers in the support groups, the enduring problem remains what to tell the children about their absent fathers. By preschool, most are asking, “Do I have a daddy?” and “Why doesn’t he live with us?”

Schneider said that when her daughter was 2 she would ask, “ ‘What is a daddy?’ She didn’t even know. Then she’d say, ‘Do I have a daddy?’ At that age, I’d say, ‘No. No, you don’t.’ And that would be it.”

She would insist on her own version of reality, such as her mother and father used to be married, but were divorced, or that her grandfather was really her father.

When she was 5, her father called the house and the girl answered the phone. “She said, ‘Mommy it’s a man and he won’t tell me who it is. . . .’ When I got off the phone, she said, ‘Who was that?’ I was torn whether to tell her or to not tell her. I said very slowly, very gently, ‘That was your dad.’ She was flabbergasted.

“A few days later, she says, ‘Mommy, why wouldn’t he tell me who he was?’ It did hurt her feelings. . . . That was a hard moment.”

On school forms where it asks “father” Schneider lists “none.”

“The thing I didn’t anticipate happening in the school setting was that my daughter would have to have answers ready for her peers. And that’s hard. . . . What should she say? She wants to fit in and she doesn’t want to seem a curiosity.”

Scott, 45, said all she knows about her son’s father, chosen from a catalogue in a fertility clinic, was that he had brown hair, was over 6 feet tall and of European descent. When her 3-year-old son, Zachary, asked, “Where’s my dad?” Scott replied, “We don’t have a daddy. We have you, aunts and uncles, and the dog. So he went on to another subject.”