BAD NEWS ABOUT ILLEGITIMACY

So you missed this story about a record jump in illegitimacy? That’s because no one ran it. The National Center for Health Statistics chose not to play up the story lurking in its tables, and apparently no one in the media figured it out for himself. A Nexis search of all major newspapers and magazines has turned up nothing except a few stories mentioning that the teenage birth rate — the tiny bit of good news in the whole report — went down by 1 percent in 1994. About illegitimacy, nothing.

But the numbers are truly remarkable. The magnitudes are stupefying. Seventy percent illegitimacy for blacks. Twenty-five percent for whites. Almost 33 percent for the nation as a whole. No one would have believed such numbers to be remotely possible just a few decades ago. But those who watch these trends have gotten used to the magnitudes. It is the increases that are downright perplexing. If a reporter had chanced to call me a week earlier for predictions, I would have bet that the illegitimacy ratio (the technical term for the percentage of births that occur out of wedlock) would show a leveling off in 1994, or maybe even a downtick. The trendline has to level off, I would have reasoned, if only because the black ratio is so extraordinarily high that it hasn’t much room to increase. But there were other reasons for optimism as well.

In the last three or four years, the elite wisdom about illegitimacy has changed profoundly, and for the better. Hardly anyone talks about illegitimacy as a benign alternative lifestyle anymore. Many, including the occasional public figure, have begun to say that having a baby without a father is wrong. The elites have stopped smiling on illegitimacy and have even started frowning a little.

I had also persuaded myself that all the noise about welfare reform had to have some good effect. I knew there was more rhetoric than substance, but at least the rhetoric was right: If you’re a woman on welfare, you’ll have to take a job. If you father a child, you will have to pay child support. Democrats say these things along with Republicans now; black leaders along with white ones. Shouldn’t all the bad-mouthing of welfare tend to make it at least a little more disreputable? Something to be avoided? Avoided, at least in some cases, by not having a baby out of wedlock?

The reasoning still seems plausible to me. But it is wrong. Ex post facto, here are the explanations for the 1994 illegitimacy numbers that make the most sense to me:

First, talk is cheap. What matters in the streets is reality. The welfare rhetoric changed, but reality was only tweaked. The size of the average welfare package has stayed virtually the same: The average AFDC payment is down a few dollars from 1990, but average food-stamp benefits are up. Other benefits (Medicaid, housing subsidies) have stayed about the same. Child support? Enforcement is easiest with oncemarried men with jobs in small municipalities. It is next to impossible with never-married men sporadically employed in large cities — the population that fathers most of the illegitimate babies. Workfare? Few of the new state-level programs have lasted long enough to estimate their results with any confidence, but past experience says they will be modestly effective at getting mothers off the rolls, and wholly ineffective at preventing women from having a baby in the first place.

Three decades of fine-tuning welfare policy has taught us at least one clear lesson: You don’t affect childbearing behavior by telling low-income and often low-IQ young women that, sometime down the track, something mildly unpleasant may happen to them. If childbearing behavior is to be changed, it will be done only by changing the largest, most tangible, most immediate realities of what it means for a woman to have a baby without a husband to help out. Much as the politicians try to get around it, the only way to change those realities dramatically is to restore the penalties on out-of- wedlock childbearing that nature and communities always imposed until the welfare system got in the way. Tougher rhetoric is irrelevant.

Second, there is seepage. What begins as a phenomenon of the lower classes trickles upward to the middle classes. In the early 1960s, college-educated black women had a very low illegitimacy ratio. We can’t know precisely, but the ratio was less than 10 percent and may have been as low as 3 percent, at a time when over 20 percent of all black children were born out of wedlock. During the 1980s and 90s, black college-educated women have lived in an environment where about two-thirds of black children are born out of wedlock – – and the illegitimacy ratio for these women has mushroomed to somewhere between 30 and 40 percent (data sources differ). At some point, increases in illegitimacy create new norms that diffuse across social classes.

White college-educated women in the 1990s have been in the same position as black college-educated women in the early 1960s — they show about 4-6 percent illegitimacy compared with 20-25 percent in the larger community. Insofar as the same kind of seepage that occurred through black society is already spreading through white society, there is no reason to expect that increases in illegitimacy will level off in the foreseeable future. Unlike the black ratio, the white ratio has plenty of room to grow.

What I cannot explain, however — even after the fact — is why the new illegitimacy figures have attracted so little attention. It isn’t as if these figures come at a moment when scholars have decided that we can live with illegitimacy after all. On the contrary, the last few years have seen an outpouring of journal articles documenting the destructive effects of illegitimacy on everything from child development to crime to the functioning of communities. Other studies have come up with a new and disturbing finding: It doesn’t help much if mothers eventually give their children a stepfather. The outcomes for children with stepfathers are only slightly better than those for children living with a mother alone.

And it isn’t as if the new illegitimacy figures come at a time when scholars have decided that public policy is not to blame. No, the last few years have seen the beginnings of a painfully reluctant shift in the academic received wisdom. As the statistical models linking welfare to illegitimacy are better specified, with better data, the known link between the welfare system and illegitimacy becomes stronger, not weaker.

It is understandable that newspapers in the hinterland might not have unearthed this story. But how about reporters on major papers who cover the welfare beat for a living? Why didn’t they read even the abstract of the National Center for Health Statistics report and see fit to explore what lies behind the quiet sentence, “Measures of nonmarital childbearing rose 4-5 percent”? Beats me.

Instead, as I write, the papers are full of stories about whether President Clinton will sign the welfarereform bill, as they faithfully hew to the accepted line: The Republicans want to save money and make welfare mothers shape up while the Democrats try to protect the nation from Republican excesses. There is bitter humor, for those who watch what is happening every day to the millions of children in communities where illegitimacy is epidemic, in the sight of Bill Clinton agonizing so publicly about approving a policy that might “punish” children. Even as his eyes fill with tears, the body count is going up faster than ever.

Charles Murray is the Bradley Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.