The Spread of Single-Parent Families
in the United States since 1960
By David T. Ellwood and Christopher Jencks
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
October 2002

The spread of single-mother families has therefore played a major role in the persistence of poverty. In 1964, when Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty, only 30 percent of poor families with children were headed by single mothers. Since the late 1970s the figure has been about 60 percent...

McLanahan and Sandefur (1994) assembled data from a number of American surveys showing that children who grew up with both of their biological parents performed better on school achievement tests, had fewer children as teenagers, finished high school more often, attended college more often, and earned more in early adulthood...For our purposes their most important finding was that children raised by both of their biological parents did better than children raised in any alternative arrangement...

Premarital sex–In the early 1960s roughly half of all twenty-five year old women had had sexual intercourse before they married. By the late 1980s five out of six had done so. Moral judgments about premarital sex changed in much the same way. In early 1960s roughly threequarters of American adults thought that premarital sex was wrong. By the 1980s only a third of adults thought that premarital sex was “always” or “almost always” wrong.

Out of wedlock births—In 1960 most men and women who engaged in premarital sex assumed that if the woman became pregnant they would marry and raise their child together. Thus while premarital pregnancies were fairly common, premarital births were rare. By the 1990s roughly one baby in three was born to an unmarried couple...

Most Americans’ worries about family change probably reflect their belief that it poses economic, developmental, and moral problems. Certainly that seemed to be the case for [Senator Daniel Patrick] Moynihan (1986) when he declared:

"The institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger social sense whether he is capable of loving his fellow men collectively. The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding and social peace..."

...the proportion of children in single parent families rose from about 10 percent in 1965 to 29 percent in 1997 but then began to fall, reaching 27 percent in 2001...In the 1980s and 1990s nearly the entire rise was traceable to out-of-wedlock births...

The pill and abortion weakened the link between marriage and childbearing.

But Obama's record on abortion is extreme. He opposed the ban on partial-birth abortion -- a practice a fellow Democrat, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once called "too close to infanticide." Obama strongly criticized the Supreme Court decision upholding the partial-birth ban. In the Illinois state Senate, he opposed a bill similar to the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, which prevents the killing of infants mistakenly left alive by abortion. And now Obama has oddly claimed that he would not want his daughters to be "punished with a baby" because of a crisis pregnancy -- hardly a welcoming attitude toward new life.