Just a Slight Statistical Boo-boo

Ye gads. Women who retained their maiden names following marriage knew they were repudiating centuries of tradition by not adopting their husband’s last name--and sometimes offending in-laws in the process. Now, due to a silly statistical quirk in California, it seems they’ve also condemned their children to statistical purgatory and social obloquy as the products of “unwed mothers.”

California is one of five states that does not include marital status on birth certificates. As a result, state and federal analysts trying to calculate the rate of children born out of wedlock must resort to statistical inference: If the mother and the father have different last names, analysts presume that the parents are not married. This in 1996, when family name splits are so common in some parts that at least one Westside elementary school includes a student list cross-referenced with a listing of “mothers with different last names.”

Word apparently did not reach the statistics bureaucrats. No surprise, then, that the most recent federal data indicates that a whopping 35% of children born in California are born to unwed mothers. This means California has the nation’s ninth-highest rate of unwed births, what Gov. Pete Wilson calls “an exploding epidemic.”

And as sociologists and politicians attest, out-of-wedlock births are a root cause for a laundry list of societal problems. Children born to single parents are indeed at greater risk for these and other problems than those reared in two-parent households. More school dropouts, drug abusers, criminals? Look to the mother’s marital status for part of the explanation.

But before we wring our hands about an “epidemic,” let’s get the facts straight. A bill introduced by Assemblywoman Jackie Speier (D-Burlingame) would include marital status on the state’s birth certificates. That should eliminate the need for statistical “inference”--and the unavoidable wrong assumptions.