IN THE 1950s, A DISTANT TEENAGE RELATIVE of mine got pregnant out of wedlock. The father was a college boy who, despite repeated entreaties from the girl’s mild-mannered papa, expressed absolutely no interest in marrying her and declared he had no intention of paying a dime’s worth of child support. So her papa phoned one of the girl’s doting uncles, a burly local politician with a well-deserved reputation as a street fighter and a license to carry a gun. After a “visit” from this uncle, the boy had a sudden change of heart. As family legend goes, he proposed on both knees and promised to provide for her until death — death being a subject that her uncle had helped him to confront. Within weeks, a wedding date was set. Within months, a bouncing baby boy was born. Within years, more children followed. The girl was happy, the children were happy, and all was matter-of-factly forgiven. ” You see,” her Italian grandmother used to say, “one man can make the babies, but sometimes other men have to make the fathers.”
Believe it or not, the fall issue of the Brookings Review brought that anecdote to mind. There, in a conventional-wisdom-shattering article, husband- and-wife economists George A. Akerlof and Janet L. Yellen argue that a large part of the surge in illegitimacy is due to the demise of the shotgun wedding. “New Mothers, Not Married: Technology Shock, the Demise of Shotgun Marriage, and the Increase in Out-of-Wedlock Births” sums up for a public-policy audience the research findings Akerlof and Yellen published in the May 1996 Quarterly Journal of Economics. Their fresh insights are timely, given the latest intellectual bidding over welfare’s role in promoting illegitimacy.
By now, almost everyone agrees that the runaway illegitimacy rate — 32 percent of U.S. live births in 1995, up from just 5.3 percent in 1960 — is ruinous. The spiral in violent youth crime, for example, and the increase in substantiated child abuse and neglect are linked to the proliferation of fatherless households. In today’s tragic tangle of social pathology, welfaredependent inner-city girls get impregnated by only-out-for-sex older men who have criminal records but no employment histories. Too often, the men hang around just long enough to maltreat the mothers and their offspring.
But the problem isn’t only American. Between 1960 and 1992 the rate of ” nonmarital births” (as the defining-deviancy-down demographers like to say) more than quintupled in almost every industrialized nation. On this measure, the United States is actually better off than Iceland (57 percent), Sweden (50 percent) and Denmark (46 percent), about even with France (33 percent) and the United Kingdom (30 percent), and worse off than Canada (27 percent) and Australia (24 percent).
Liberals and conservatives give different explanations for this illegitimate-baby boom. Conservative analysts insist that since 1960 illegitimacy among lowincome women has been driven skyward by perversely generous government welfare benefits that subsidize rather than stigmatize the irresponsible behavior of those who bear children outside marriage, often without the capacity to care for their young. Their solution: abolish or slash welfare. Liberals respond that welfare benefits have little, if any, effect on fertility. Their solution to illegitimacy: provide better “family planning services,” including counseling, parenting classes, and easy-to- obtain abortions.
To date, the best scholarly summaries of the two points of view are Charles Murray’s 1993 article in the Journal of Labor Economics and the 1995 Brookings volume Looking Before We Leap: Social Science and Welfare Reform, edited by R. Kent Weaver and William T. Dickens. Lately, the liberals have been losing empirical ground to Murray. For instance, there is now scattered evidence that welfare time limits may trim illegitimacy rates. And a recent study sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences suggests that among low- income women, every 1 percent increase in welfare benefits triggers a 1.2 percent increase in illegitimacy.
Still, neither side has clinched its case empirically. And some analysts are wary of both camps. In his Wriston Lecture at the Manhattan Institute in 1994, James Q. Wilson admonished both liberals and conservatives to face up to the fact that the recent debate about welfare reform and illegitimacy has been based almost entirely on “untested assumptions, ideological posturing, and perverse priorities.” Clearly addressing himself mainly to conservative reformers, Wilson cautioned, “It is fathers whose behavior we most want to change, and nobody has yet explained how cutting off welfare to mothers will make biological fathers act like real fathers.”
Thoughtful conservatives need to take heed and revisit the welfare/illegitimacy question. They should begin by considering Akerlof and Yellen’s work. Fathers are very much on these authors’ minds, though their story begins with what they call the “reproductive-technology shock.”
Around 1970, observe Akerlof and Yellen, the United States and other industrialized democracies legalized abortion and made contraceptive aids more widely available, giving women unprecedented control over the number and timing of their children. Most observers expected the rate of illegitimate births to decline. But the opposite happened — because of the way the abortion-contraception shock undercut the longstanding custom of shotgun marriage.
“Before 1970,” argue Akerlof and Yellen, “the stigma of unwed motherhood was so great that few women were willing to bear children outside of marriage. The only circumstance that would cause women to engage in sexual activity was a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy. Men were willing to make (and keep) that promise, for they knew that in leaving one woman they would be unlikely to find another who would not make the same demand.”
Abortion and contraception changed this. They made unwanted pregnancy seem avoidable and unwanted childbearing actually avoidable, at least for women willing to undergo abortion. As a result, more women chose to risk sexual activity without commitment. And the more they did, the less women in general enjoyed leverage over men, who now could leave one partner with a reasonable prospect of finding another willing to engage in sexual relations without any promises. Just as the sexual revolution made “the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother,” write Akerlof and Yellen, it made “marriage and child support a social choice of the father.”
Akerlof and Yellen chart the decline of shotgun arriage. In the period 1965- 69, shotgun weddings were the norm in cases of premarital pregnancy. They estimate that nearly 60 percent of first-birth white women and a quarter of first-birth black women who conceived outside of marriage got the fathers to marry them. By the early 1980s, these rates had fallen sharply. “If the shotgun marriage rate had remained steady from 1965 to 1990,” they maintain, ” 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.”
So far, so insightful. Unfortunately, Akerlof and Yellen get cold feet at the public-policy altar. First, they mischaracterize Charles Murray as attributing the increase in illegitimacy simply “to overly generous federal welfare benefits.” In fact, Murray was way ahead of them in arguing that out- of-wedlock childbearing has proliferated because it now results not in social ostracism but in its opposite — a gusher of financial and social support.
Then, though conceding that “federal benefits may play a role” in illegitimacy rates among blacks and low-income women for whom “an increase in welfare benefits has the same effect on out-of-wedlock births as a decline in the stigma to bearing a child out-of-wedlock,” they go on to assert that cuts in welfare “would only further immiserize the victims.” The honeymoon with welfare is never over.
But the biggest disappointment is what Akerlof and Yellen say about reproductive-technology shock and shotgun weddings. Reinstating restrictions on abortion and contraception, they argue, “would almost surely be counterproductive.” By contrast, they express confidence that men unwilling to marry can be held financially responsible by such popgun measures as child- support laws, plus schemes that “tax men for fathering children, thereby offsetting at least partially the change in terms between fathers and mothers. “
It has been at least three decades since any major jurisdiction in America really enforced its child-support laws. Thirty years ago, non-supporters were viewed as lowlifes who needed not only to pay up but to be taught a lesson. Lawmen would cross state lines to bring back fathers who fled; one from Philadelphia recalled flying all the way to California to capture a single deadbeat. But today’s federal, state, and local child-support laws, like child-abuse and statutory-rape laws, are largely a farce, especially when fathers change residences, change states, or visit state pens for other crimes. I doubt the IRS could do better by taxing the bums.
Yet James Q. Wilson is right: We have to find ways of changing fathers’ behavior. This means pushing childbearing back into marriage — that is, delegitimizing the non-marital childbearing that now occurs on a mass scale. I, for one, would bet on three approaches.
PFirst, follow Wilson’s advice in Commentary and elsewhere and make welfare payments for teenage mothers contingent on their living in adult- supervised settings. The new welfare law does nothing of the sort.
PSecond, tie welfare for teenage mothers to the work of churches that monitor, mentor, and minister to at-risk youth, teaching and preaching absolute moral prohibitions against premarital sex. Organize women to teach young girls what’s really at stake, why they should just say no, and to whom they should turn if anyone, especially an older man, won’t take no for an answer.
PLast but not least, bring back the shotgun wedding. Start by acknowledging in plain language that most men, especially young ones, will take sex without commitment and without honor if you offer it free of any adverse consequence. Admit that abortion and contraception are culprits in raising illegitimacy rates and in fostering the feminization of poverty. Don’t settle for biological fathers’ support payments; demand their positive, permanent presence where women and children need them and their entire earnings. And again, use churches and other local institutions to publicize the names and games of sex scammers. Organize committees of clergy and other men to visit those who hit and run. Have the precinct police crack down hard on domestic abuse of women and children. And treat the statutory rape of poor black girls with the same moral seriousness that liberal elites now lavish on “date rape” on college campuses.
And remember: The worst consequences of the illegitimacy spiral for every race and place have yet to be felt. The 68.1 percent of blacks and 22.6 percent of whites born out of wedlock in 1992 will not reach the all-hell- breaks-loose age of 14 until the year 2006, which is still all of a decade away.
