State Sees a Decline in Births to Single Women

California led the nation in reducing the rate of births to unwed women without driving up abortions over the last few years, the federal Department of Health and Human Services said Monday.

The state will share a $100-million award with the District of Columbia, Michigan, Alabama and Massachusetts for success in discouraging single parenthood, a major goal of the landmark Welfare Reform Act of 1996. Each jurisdiction will get $20 million.

The prize, announced Monday, marks the first running of a most unusual contest--a race to reduce births among single women, who are at substantial risk of welfare dependency if they have children out of wedlock.

The competition, with its monetary award, reflects one of the Welfare Reform Act’s most far-reaching ambitions: to reverse decades of decline in two-parent families, a trend that is widely tied to the nation’s growing rate of poverty among children.

The number of California children born to unmarried mothers dropped by 5.7%--from a yearly average of 32.48% of births out of wedlock in the 1994-95 period to an average of 30.42% for 1996 and 1997. The state’s rate of out-of-wedlock births, which was near the national average at the beginning of the period, fell below the national rate in the later years. California officials credit increased access to birth control and “changing social mores” for making single parenthood less acceptable.

One indicator of the state’s decline in out-of-wedlock births is the sharp decrease in the number of Orange County teen mothers participating in a Social Services Agency parenting skills program.

In 1994, about 700 teens were in the Cal-Learn program; today that number is just 325.

Any teen mother age 19 or younger is eligible for Cal-Learn, which offers mentoring by senior social workers, cash incentives to stay in school and information about sexuality and parenting.

Although welfare reform legislation passed in 1996 has contributed to the steady decline in out-of-wedlock births, the drop in numbers began in 1994, when the economy began to improve, said Angelo Doti, director of Family Self Sufficiency for the Orange County Social Services Agency.

“I think there are probably a lot of reasons this is going down,” he said. “Part of it is education about safe sex and the use of contraception. A lot is teaching abstinence, forestalling having any additional children and helping them curb their sexuality and emphasize education and employment goals.”

In setting out the terms of the contest, lawmakers hoped to provide states with incentives to reduce out-of-wedlock births. And across the country, states have responded by launching a wide range of initiatives, from abstinence programs to caps on a family’s welfare payment after the birth of additional children.

But the lawmakers also hoped that the contest would showcase what they expected would be a stark difference between the pre-welfare and post-welfare eras in the marriage and birth patterns of low-income Americans.

The latest federal figures suggest that although there has been change in some states, unwed birthrates have not gone down in most of the country. In total, just 12 states reduced unwed births in the period measured. But in the rest of the country, the ranks of single parents swelled, sometimes substantially. In North Dakota, for instance, births to single mothers increased by 10%.

Nationally, roughly one in three babies are born to a single woman, a figure that has remained roughly stable since it peaked in 1994. In 1985, 22% of the nation’s births were out of wedlock.

Douglas Besharov, a welfare-policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., has widely predicted that welfare reform would sharply reduce out-of-wedlock births. On Monday, he said declines in some states seem to be driven by a trend that predates the debate over welfare reform--a marked long-term decline in out-of-wedlock birthrates among African Americans.

The early returns shown in Monday’s figures remain inconclusive, Besharov acknowledged, but they are hopeful.

“I wouldn’t want to get carried away by these numbers, but I do think we’re getting a little more conservative about these things, and it’s showing up in some of the numbers,” Besharov said. “You have to be pretty oblivious to your surroundings if you grew up in a neighborhood where there are lots of single mothers and you don’t realize this is a hard way to go. It’s called social learning.”

The prize money can be used for any purpose allowed under the federal definition of welfare.

States could use the funds for family planning or abstinence programs, child care initiatives or any program designed to assist welfare recipients in finding, securing or holding on to jobs.

For California, the award will add to a growing backlog of unspent welfare funds from the federal government. Many states have such backlogs; as of last March, California had a $586-million pool of federal funds that remained unspent and uncommitted.

The states started with widely different track records in out-of-wedlock births, and experts said they all pursued different strategies to discourage single parenthood. In Michigan, an official said there was “not one simple answer,” but credited a statewide initiative to promote abstinence.

“Obviously, we didn’t set out to reduce out-of-wedlock births in order to get bonus money, but we’re thrilled,” said Geralyn Lasher, a spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of Community Health.

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Times staff writer Lisa Richardson contributed to this report.