Away From Shotgun Marriages

I will not comment much at the moment on this essay from the Brookings Institute New Mothers, Not Married: Technology shock, the demise of shotgun marriage, and the increase in out of wedlock births. Brookings has some notably liberal assumptions in its commentary here, especially at the policy stage, but they do seem to be trying to play straight with the data, which is good enough for me.  I can work with it, even if I disagree or think I see some missing pieces.

The basic premise is that the technology shock of increased availability to both abortion (a 12x increase) and contraception in the late 60s into the 70s was large enough that it changed the expectations of both women and men about premarital sex, pregnancy, and expectation of marriage.  The authors believe this is not the entire explanation, but covers a major chunk of it. The more usual explanations they regard as possible, but showing much less explanatory power when compared to the actual numbers.

Since 1969, however, the tradition of shotgun marriage has seriously eroded (see table 1 for the trend from 1965 through 1984). For whites, in particular, the shotgun marriage rate began its decline at almost the same time as the reproductive technology shock. And the decline in shotgun marriages has contributed heavily to the rise in the out-of-wedlock birth rate for both white and Black women. In fact, about 75 percent of the increase in the white out-of-wedlock first-birth rate, and about 60 percent of the Black increase, between 1965 and 1990 is directly attributable to the decline in shotgun marriages. If the shotgun marriage rate had remained steady from 1965 to 1990, white out-of-wedlock births would have risen only 25 percent as much as they have. Black out-of-wedlock births would have increased only 40 percent as much.

For reference, I think the expectation of marriage after unexpected pregnancy remained stronger in evangelical and conservative Catholic circles longer, though the trend away from it was there also - just slower and/or weaker. I do find talking with people of my own generation now that they have forgotten how most people, including they themselves, thought about what men and women (or boys and girls) were supposed to do if an unmarried woman became pregnant. They retrofit later ideas onto that society, believing that couples could have behaved then much as they did even twenty years later. There's that photogenic memory James was talking about again.