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BACKGROUND In the U.S. today, premarital first births occur disproportionately to women with low education and income. We lack studies of whether this education gradient was present in cohorts born earlier. OBJECTIVE We examine education differences in the proportion of U.S. white and black women who: (a) experienced a premarital conception taken to term resulting in a first birth, and (b) had a premarital first birth by age 35. Among those experiencing a premarital conception, we examine the association between education and whether women married before the birth. We examine these patterns for birth cohorts born between 1925 and 1959. METHODS We use the 1980, 1985, 1990, and 1995 June Fertility Supplements from the U.S. Current Population Survey to examine cohorts of women born between 1925 and 1959. The survey asked women the dates of their first marriage and their first birth, allowing us to determine premarital conceptions taken to term, and whether the resulting first births occurred within or outside of first marriage. We present descriptive information on the proportion of black and white women in each cohort who experienced the events of interest by age 35. RESULTS For all cohorts, women with low education were generally more likely than their more educated counterparts to experience premarital conceptions and premarital first births. For blacks, but not whites, who experienced a premarital conception that was taken to term, those with more education were more likely to marry before the birth. CONCLUSIONS In the U.S., the concentration of premarital conceptions and premarital first births among less educated women was present for cohorts extending back to those born in 1925. 1. Introduction It is well known that, in the U.S., nonmarital births have increased for both whites and blacks (Bachu 1999; Wu 2008; Ventura 2009), and that, in recent decades, women who have nonmarital births are disproportionately of low education and income (Upchurch et al. 2002; Ellwood and Jencks 2004). This paper examines whether the relationship between education and having a premarital conception or first birth existed for earlier U.S. birth cohorts. 2. Data and methods We pool data from the retrospective marital and fertility histories from the June 1980, 1985, 1990, and 1995 U.S. Current Population Surveys (CPS). These June CPS fertility and marital supplements were administered to married women aged 15 or older and never-married women aged 18 or older. We use these data to identify the date (to the nearest month) of first births and first marriages. We assume that all conceptions occurred nine months prior to the birth, and employ a definition of a premaritally conceived but postmarital first birth as a first birth occurring less than seven months after a first marriage.4 This in effect assumes that first births that occur seven or eight months after a first marriage are premature births conceived within marriage. This procedure clearly introduces some classification errors, but provides a standard operational definition of a premarital conception for those conceptions taken to term. Because these data contain no information on pregnancies ending in miscarriage or abortion, our analyses are limited to conceptions taken to term. A further limitation of these data is that they lack information on cohabitation. However, the vast majority of premarital conceptions taken to term and resulting in a first birth to women born between 1925 and 1959 occurred in periods when abortion and cohabitation were relatively uncommon. Unweighted estimates are presented throughout. We limit our analysis to first marriages and first births. For the birth cohorts we examine, about three out of four premarital conceptions taken to term involved first births, and about nine out of ten marriages occurring between a premarital conception and a first birth were first marriages (results not shown). …

Historical trends in U.S. nonmarital fertility have been compiled almost exclusively from vital statistics on births. This paper complements this historical record by providing cohort estimates of nonmarital fertility for cohorts of U.S. women spanning approximately 50 years of cohort experience. Life table estimates using retrospective marital and fertility histories in the June 1980, 1985, 1990, and 1995 Current Population Surveys reveal nonnegligible levels of nonmarital fertility historically. For women born between 1925 and 1929, nearly 1 in 10 had at least one nonmarital birth by age 30. For women born between 1965 and 1969, more than 1 of 4 had one or more nonmarital births by age 30, with roughly 1 of 5 white, 3 of 5 black, and 1 in 3 Hispanic women having at least one nonmarital birth by age 30. Life table estimates reveal a twofold increase between ages 20 and 30 in the percentage of women with at least one child outside of formal marriage for all cohorts of white and Hispanic women, and an increase of roughly two-thirds for all cohorts of black women. I also document qualitative differences in nonmarital fertility by race/ethnicity, with the percentage of nonmarital births following a divorce or marital separation for white women approximately twice that for black or Hispanic women. Finally, I introduce a new measure, the cohort nonmarital fertility ratio (CNMFR), which provides a cohort complement to the standard period nonmarital fertility ratio. Conservative estimates reveal a roughly threefold increase in the CNMFR for women born from 1925-1929 to 1950-1954 for both whites and blacks, despite substantially higher levels of nonmarital fertility among black women. Overall, these findings reveal surprisingly high levels of nonmarital fertility for women born since the 1920s and confirm that nonmarital fertility has become an increasingly substantial component of overall U.S. fertility

This article provides an overview of current theory and empirical research on the fertility of single or cohabiting parents, with particular emphasis on research in the fields of demography, economics, history, and sociology. Topics covered include: historical shifts in usage concerning the terms employed to refer to these behaviors; measurement issues that arise in the study of nonmarital fertility; demographic trends; functionalist, historical, and policy literatures; empirical research to date on the socioeconomic determinants, including within-country and cross-national variation in the association between nonmarital fertility and socioeconomically disadvantage; consequences for women and children; and the continuing conceptual and theoretical challenges posed by the study of nonmarital fertility.

We examine cohort trends in premarital first births for U.S. women born between 1920 and 1964. The rise in premarital first births is often argued to be a consequence of the retreat from marriage, with later ages at first marriage resulting in more years of exposure to the risk of a premarital first birth. However, cohort trends in premarital first births may also reflect trends in premarital sexual activity, premarital conceptions, and how premarital conceptions are resolved. We decompose observed cohort trends in premarital first births into components reflecting cohort trends in (1) the age-specific risk of a premarital conception taken to term; (2) the age-specific risk of first marriages not preceded by such a conception, which will influence women’s years of exposure to the risk of a premarital conception; and (3) whether a premarital conception is resolved by entering a first marriage before the resulting first birth (a “shotgun marriage”). For women born between 1920–1924 and 1945–1949, increases in premarital first births were primarily attributable to increases in premarital conceptions. For women born between 1945–1949 and 1960–1964, increases in premarital first births were primarily attributable to declines in responding to premarital conceptions by marrying before the birth. Trends in premarital first births were affected only modestly by the retreat from marriages not preceded by conceptions—a finding that holds for both whites and blacks. These results cast doubt on hypotheses concerning “marriageable” men and instead suggest that increases in premarital first births resulted initially from increases in premarital sex and then later from decreases in responding to a conception by marrying before a first birth.

Ermisch (2009) criticized Gray, Stockard, and Stone (2006), arguing that they incorrectly tested a model positing a nonlinear relationship between the nonmarital fertility ratio and the proportion of unmarried women. I identify a different problem, which is that even if this model were to hold for a particular population, it would not in general hold for subgroups of this population; likewise, were it to hold for subgroups, it would not hold for aggregations of these subgroups.

This paper evaluates the data quality of two demographic variables in light of hypotheses on respondent recall from the literature on survey methodology. An emerging consensus in this literature is that recall of the timing of an event declines with recall duration unless the dating of an event is frequently "rehearsed." We provide empirical evidence consistent with this hypothesis by assessing the quality of demographic data on two event history variables as supplied by female respondents. A first outcome concerns the interval between a first and second birth. We assess examine birth intervals using birth registration data from the Vital Statistics on Natality (VSN) and individual-level survey data from the 1990 June Current Population Survey (CPS), the 1979-93 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), and the 1988 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). Overall, we find relatively little variation in the quality of birth interval data across these four surveys, with onie exception-CPS data in which responses have been allocated. A second demographic variable is age at first sexual intercourse. We engage in several analyses of this variable. First, we use NLSY data to analyze discrepan

The authors examine three hypotheses regarding the impact of a womans family characteristics between birth and age 19 on her chances of having a premarital birth. "We construct dynamic measures of family structure using parent-history data from the [U.S.] National Survey of Families and Households. We use these data to examine the relative importance of family events during childhood changes in family structure during childhood and adolescence and durations spent in the modal family structures experienced by respondents while growing up. Our results suggest that these dynamic measures capture both theoretically and empirically distinct dimensions of family experience and that distinguishing between these dimensions provides sufficient analytical leverage to test the socialization social control and instability and change hypotheses." (EXCERPT)