User:ChoiceMom/Choice Mom

Choice Mom

Although the number of births to teenage girls and young women in their early 20s is high, a large number of unmarried mothers giving birth each year are older women. According to National Center of Health Statistics, there were 1.71 million births in the U.S. to single women in 2007, and 37 percent of them were to women over the age of 35.

An economist at Williams College compiled data examining the birthrate for unmarried college-educated women and found it has climbed 145 percent since 1980, compared with a 60 percent increase for non-college-educated single women.

Unmarried women adopt roughly 10,000 children from the U.S. child-welfare system each year, as well as in private and international adoptions.

One reason women in their late 20s and early 30s are deciding to become single mothers is because they are less concerned about raising a child alone than they are about missing their ability to conceive before fertility wanes.

Close to 40 percent of the unmarried college-educated mothers give birth for the first time after the age of 30. Typically these are women who planned to marry, did not find a partner by their 30s, then decide to have a child without a partner. Others divorce in their early 30s while childless and decide to build a family on their own rather than rush into another relationship. Many are with partners who don't want a child and choose to leave the relationship and have a child on their own.

What’s less familiar is what these women do next. Increasingly, instead of giving their children a father, they give them a sibling. Schmidt’s data show that second births to unmarried college-educated women have risen even more rapidly than first births — nearly sevenfold since 1980. For Fran and her friends, a second child, not a husband, becomes the path to normalcy.