Out-of-wedlock births in the lower classes

A recent book I read provides an interesting portrait of what sociologists lately call 'the under class'–this is thought to be more PC than 'the lower class'. The book is Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas. It's an attempt to explain to middle-class readers (well, the authors only talk about the middle class, so I assume they mean middle and upper class) why poor women often have children out of wedlock, and at a very young age (a mean age of 21, including many women who gave birth at younger ages, even thirteen and fourteen).

The poor are different from us; they have less money. The personal touches in this book give us glimpses of a strange new world--one where a sixteen-year-old boy will tell his girlfriend, 'I want to have a baby by you'--and she takes it as a compliment! There are a few fascinating statistics–"the poor, the less-educated, those living in poor neighborhoods, and those raised in single-parent households tend to have far fewer friendships than their more advantaged counterparts." And, of white women who have never had a premarital birth, 89% will get married before they turn 40. We're all doooomed....

But, the authors say, poor women have many of the same beliefs about marriage as the rest of us. Most people today of whatever class believe that marriage is difficult and divorce is to be avoided, and that for that reason, people should wait to get married until they are older and until they know and trust their prospective partners very well. There is a perception that getting married means settling down--the end of travel, fun, career change and flexibility. With these beliefs, it makes sense that members of the lower classes don't marry early. So the question is not, 'Why don't they get married?', but rather, 'Why do they have babies?'

SImply put, because the perceived costs of having children are lower, and the perceived benefits higher. As for the benefits, what would you do if you had little or no higher education or career ambitions to look forward to? Having children might seem like the only really meaningful thing in your life–the only thing giving you hope for the future. When asked to imagine what their lives would be like without children, the women in the study typically said things like, 'I'd be dead.' 'I'd be in jail.' 'I'd be depressed.' 'I'd still be partying.' 'I'd be on drugs.' These seem to be the other options.

As for the costs, the out-of-pocket costs of having children are the same whether the mother is 30 or 13. But the opportunity costs of children are very different for different classes. Specifically, they're much lower for the lower classes.

The public often assumes that early childbearing is the main reason why so many girls from poor inner-city areas fail to complete high school, go on to college, gain valuable work skills, or earn decent wages, but there is virtually no evidence to support this idea. Any childbearing at all, and especially early childbearing, has huge opportunity costs for middle-class women. But disadvantaged girls who bear children have about the same long-term earnings trajectories as similarly disadvantaged youth who wait until their mid or late twenties to have a child...Early childbearing is highly selective of girls whose other characteristics–family background, cognitive ability, school performance, mental health status, and so on–have already diminished their life chances so much that an early birth does little to reduce them much further.

The authors focus on the agency of the women in their study, and it seems as though these women chose to become pregnant, rather than being coerced into it by their boyfriends or by a lack of access to birth control or abortion. This leads the authors to ignore some signs of lack of agency–a really amazing passivity, not just in some cases, but in most. For instance, only 17% of these women's pregnancies were planned. Some were 'accidents', but, bizarrely, the plurality were described as 'in between' an accident and a planned pregnancy. Typically, the woman will say that she didn't want to get pregnant, but that she wasn't using any birth control. It is almost impossible for me to understand how a person could leave such an important decision up to chance–but hey, it's the traditional way. The women studied say things like, 'The baby happened', 'God gave me this baby' and so forth.

I wonder if this lack of agency is related to their socioeconomic statuses. Making a decision is a skill like any other, and needs to be practiced. We read that children who have grown up under circumstances display 'learned helplessness'–they have learned that nothing they can do can make a positive difference in what happens to them, and that actively doing anything often brings punishment. So they take no action. They may express preferences, but they do not intervene in their own fate. Maybe for the lowest classes, something similar happens.