CRS – Nonmarital Births: An Overview. Carmen Solomon-Fears, Specialist in Social Policy. July 30, 2014

“In the United States, births to unmarried women (i.e., nonmarital births) are widespread, including families of varying income class, race, ethnicity, and geographic area. Many analysts attribute this to changed attitudes over many years about fertility and marriage. They find that many adult women and teenage girls no longer feel obliged to marry before, or as a consequence of, having children. During the period from 1940 to 2008, the percentage of births to unmarried women increased from 3.8% in 1940 to 40.6% in 2008, and has remained at about 41% each  subsequent year through 2013. This represented 1.6 million children in 2013. Although nonmarital childbearing is not a new phenomenon, the relatively recent factors associated with historically high levels of nonmarital childbearing are that women are marrying later in life and more couples are cohabiting. Other factors include decreased childbearing of married couples, increased marital dissolution, increased sexual activity outside of marriage, participation in risky behaviors that often lead to sex, improper use of contraceptive methods, and lack of marriageable partners. “Nonmarital births” can be first births, second births, or higher-order births; they can precede a marriage or occur to a woman who has never married. “Nonmarital births” can occur to divorced or widowed women. Moreover, a woman with several children may have had one or more births within marriage and one or more births outside of marriage. A majority of nonmarital births now are to cohabiting parents. Between 2006 and 2010, 58% of nonmarital births were to cohabiting parents, compared with 40% in 2002.4 Unlike in years past, although most of the children born outside of marriage are raised by a single parent (who may or may not have a “significant other”), many, especially during their infancy, live with both of their biological parents who are not married to each other.”