A Different Way Of Looking At Unwed Parents?

So over at Ann Althouse’s blog, a discussion on black families in poverty and some throw-away lines on the welfare state as the cause of the surge in unmarried parenting. And my first thought was this:

Many of the reasons that are offered are specific to the history of the black community. Legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination. The loss of jobs in the 70s. The willingness of men, but not women, to intermarry. Men in prison.

But the rates are high for Hispanics, too — who don’t have this legacy of slavery. So far as I understand, the rates for second-generation Mexican-Americans are far higher than their immigrant parents or, indeed, Mexicans who remained in Mexico.

So I’d like to look this up — verify this hunch, and see if anyone’s written about it.

But before I got that far, I ended up with something different: the CDC report on vital statistics related to births. So I took the table from page 69, copied it into excel, cleaned it up, simplified it, and got this:

	Black*	Hispanic	White*	Asian
Rate per 1,000 unmarried
women in specified group
15-44 years	62.6	72.6	32.1	22.9
15-19 years	43.4	41.8	17.8	8.1
20-24 years	103.5	96.5	46.6	22.0
25-29 years	91.2	113.2	47.8	35.2
30-34 years	59.6	103.9	40.2	43.6
35-39 years	29.7	57.6	21.8	30.1
40-44 years	8.1	16.5	6.1	12.1

Percent of births to
unmarried women
All ages	71.6	53.5	29.3	17.0
15-19 years	97.3	87.2	84.8	80.5
20-24 years	87.4	66.6	54.8	45.5
25-29 years	67.2	47.9	24.1	18.0
30-34 years	51.1	37.7	13.4	9.3
35-39 years	43.2	34.8	13.1	9.1
40 years and over	40.0	35.7	16.7	12.1

			* Non-Hispanic only

One section of the table that I didn’t copy and format is the raw numbers themselves but here are the key figures, in total:
Blacks: 420,977
Hispanics: 485,166
Whites: 626,131
Asians: 46,395
American Indian/Alaskan Native are in there too, but their totals are small enough that the CDC doesn’t calculate rates.

So what do you make of this?

I’m not sure. And now the kids are bugging me to get off the computer, so I’ll have to continue this later!

UPDATE:
so the kids are playing outside now, and I’ve gone back to the CDC tables. The data is complex, and I don’t really have the tools to analyze it easily (maybe it exists in excel form somewhere? I don’t know), but there are further tables which provide some historical perspective. Teen births, among all groups, are down, and it’s clear that the birth rate at older ages, both for unmarried and married women, is where the increase is at. But the “non-Hispanic white” rates are only shown since 1990 (this is page 70 – 71 of the linked report), so it’s difficult to draw many conclusions; rates for Hispanics and Blacks, as well as whites, including Hispanics, are shown since 1980.

Here’s what I notice:

for non-Hispanic whites, the unmarried birth rates declined for teens, ticked up moderately for the 20-24 age group, and increased significantly in all other age groups, since 1990.

For blacks, with data from 1980, rates dropped from 81.1 (increasing to 90.5 in 1990) to 62.6 births per 1,000 unmarried women, in total. Interestingly, 1990 is something of a peak year: for age 25-29, rates went from 81.4 to 105.3 and down to 91.2. It’s only in the 35+ year age brackets that unmarried black women are bearing more children now than in 1980 or 1990, and for the 30-34 age group, they peaked in about 1990, dropped, and are nearly at that peak again.

For Asians, data is only available from 2012, but even in this short time period, unmarried childbearing rates at decreasing at younger ages, and increasing at older ages — so much so that the rates are actually higher for Asian women ages 35+ than their white counterparts.

And Hispanics? The same pattern: the increase in unmarried birth rates is in the older ages.

What’s surprising is that the high fertility rates for Hispanics in general mean that the unmarried fertility rates are, depending on age, about equal or higher for Hispanics than for blacks, even though the percent of total births to unmarried women figure is lower. (See the original table above.)

At any rate — does this mean that the percent of children born to unmarried parents is just a result of fewer babies born to married parents, so a movement in the other side of the ratio? I’m not sure the data shows that, since the fertility rate for unmarried parents is only one side of the coin — if the share of the population that is unmarried is increasing as well.

But what is more interesting is that the growth is in older, not younger women. What do you make of that?

A different way of looking at unwed parents?