Wedding Bells No Longer Chime for Most Moms Having First Child

She was holding down a job as a blackjack dealer when she got pregnant, and Pam Hesse didn’t deal herself a very good hand: Turned out the father was sleeping with the woman who threw her baby shower. But it was hard to let go of the dream she’d had for so long.

“When I was growing up I thought, ‘I’m going to get married by the time I’m 25 and have two kids and my life is going to be wonderful and that’s that,”’ said Hesse, who lives in her native Grand Forks, N.D.

Five years later, Hesse is 32 and has Cody and Alec, a second son by another man she calls “just incredible.” They share a home and a future, but not a formal vow--just one couple caught up in the seismic shifts taking place in American attitudes toward marriage and childbearing.

A soon-to-be-released Census Bureau report shows Hesse is far from an exception; in fact, she’s in the majority. The report, the bureau’s first compilation of all its 60 years of data on childbearing and marriage, finds that for the first time, the majority of “first births”--someone’s first child--were either conceived by or born to an unmarried woman. That is up from 18% in the 1930s.

It’s hardly news that people live together, have sex, even bear children together outside marriage. But the majority?

“This is connected to an erosion of the centrality of marriage,” said Stephanie Coontz of Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., who studies the family and its role in history.

In “Our Town,” his renowned 1938 play about small-town America, Thornton Wilder positioned marriage as a given: “Almost everybody in the world gets married--you know what I mean?” the Stage Manager character says. “In our town there aren’t hardly any exceptions. Most everybody in the world climbs into their graves married.”

Two generations later, the federal study shows that the percentage of children conceived by unmarried people is essentially unchanged from the 1930s. However, the percentage of children born to unmarried parents has increased fivefold. In other words, sex without marriage may have been an option--however hidden--but children meant marriage.

And unlike the explosion of teen pregnancy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the rise in out-of-wedlock births today represents women in their 20s and 30s. While the fraction of unwed mothers who were teenagers fell from half in the 1970s to about a third in 1996, the number of unmarried mothers in their 30s has doubled.

These women are old enough to get married; they’re just choosing not to.

But this isn’t just about the demise of the shotgun marriage. The Census Bureau found that more women who have children without being married are staying single one year, two years, even five years after the birth.

Lawbooks in many parts of the world are removing references to “illegitimacy” and guaranteeing children access to both parents’ resources, even if they never married. Forms at schools, banks and hospitals no longer assume parents are married. Doctors specialize in treating foreign babies adopted by single women.

And celebrities from Madonna to Rosie O’Donnell arouse little controversy by rearing children alone. Society has grown accustomed to that concept: When one of the country’s largest tabloid newspapers snagged an exclusive interview with Jodie Foster just days before her son’s birth, the writer mentioned Foster’s “fatherless family” only once--halfway through the article.

Social scientists say the statistics tell many stories--tales of women’s growing financial power, of major confusion in relationships, of ever-increasing life spans and a culture and economy that value independence.

But not tales of people who don’t want marriage--just of people who want a good one.

“There are very few women who are like, ‘I’ve got this fantastic Alan-Alda-diaper-changing man but I’m just not going to marry him,” said Andrea Engber, head of the National Organization of Single Mothers, based in Midland, N.C. “If they could wave a wand and have Mr. Right, they would. But what they’re doing is not settling for Mr. Adequate.”

Even marriage experts who disagree on just about anything else say the rise in out-of-wedlock births reflects Americans’ difficulties in negotiating the new marital waters.

“There are no scripts for people living in the kinds of relationships people are living in. They’re kind of pioneers in that they’re both working, both trying to be equal. Marriage is an institution in transition,” said Arlene Skolnick, a sociologist at New York University.

So dramatic are the changes that the National Institutes of Health held its first conference on the topic this summer, exploring why people are “partnering” the way they are. The conclusion: Romantic love isn’t dead, but it may not be enough to hold a marriage together.

As gender roles blur, women earn their own money and men no longer need wives in order to climb the corporate ladder. Divorce has become commonplace, challenging the view that marriage is a permanent commitment.

“As you lose the economic reasons to marry, the reasons are about love and romance and being with the person you most enjoy, and that kind of a connection is a lot less strong glue than obligation and dependency and social rules,” said Barbara Risman, author of the newly released book “Gender Vertigo: American Families in Transition.”

Economists often theorize that marriages are less alluring because men and women are acquiring similar skills--both can defrost the TV dinner--and therefore depend less upon one another. Before, marriage had more benefits because each person “specialized,” the woman in child-rearing, the man in making money.

Others feel Americans’ growing disinclination to marry is merely a reflection of an economy that values independence, flexibility and the ability to move cities, jobs and employers.

“We as a postindustrial culture at large are becoming less willing to make long-term commitments, and marriage gets caught up in that,” said Larry Bumpass, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Demography, the government’s primary researcher on marriage and cohabitation. “We’re conditioned by the nature of our economy to keep our options open.”

That same transient lifestyle may prove a boost to the institution of marriage in the future.

“Marriage remains in its importance as our other social connections to our community decrease,” Risman said. “As we become more highly mobile, and you don’t live near family or friends, the ‘two of you against the world’ becomes more important.”