The Reproductive Context of Cohabitation in the United States: Recent Change and Variation in Contraceptive Use

Drawing on data from 2 waves of the National Survey of Family Growth (N = 11,065), the current research addressed 2 overarching questions about the reproductive context of cohabitation in the United States. First, did patterns of contraceptive use among cohabitors change during the last 2 decades of the 20th century? Second, did patterns of contraceptive use among cohabiting women tend to vary by education or race/ethnicity? Results point to a growing resemblance between never-married cohabiting women and those in first marriages in the likelihood of using a "very effective" contraceptive method and suggest that cohabitation is most "marriage like" with respect to reproductive behavior among the least educated. Key Words: cohabitation, contraception, marriage, social change, social trends, U.S. families. Recent growth in the numbers of unmarried couples living together in the United States and many other industrialized countries raises fundamental questions about how such unions fit into the broader landscape of family life. A key theme of family research since the 1970s has been the extent to which motivations for cohabitating relationships resemble those for marriage (Seltzer, 2004; Smock, 2000). Yet as the experience of cohabitation becomes more common and a broader range of couples choose to cohabit, family scholars have argued that the meaning of cohabitation itself may be both heterogeneous and changing over time (e.g., Brown, 2005; Musick, 2007; Phillips & Sweeney, 2005; Seltzer, 2004). Indeed, change and variability in the meaning of nonmarital cohabitation have become central themes of contemporary family research. Reproductive behavior can provide important insight into the role of cohabitation in patterns of family formation. Scholars frequently compare cohabitation to marriage with respect to patterns of conception, childbearing, and childrearing to better understand how the function of cohabitation differs from that of marriage and how these relative meanings may tend to vary among subpopulations, across countries, and over time (e.g., Heuveline & Timberlake, 2004; Kiernan, 2001; Manning, 2001; Musick, 2002; Raley, 2001). Although contraceptive use is a key proximate determinant of fertility (Bongaarts, 1978; Davis & Blake, 1956), remarkably little is known about patterns of contraceptive use among cohabiting women. The limited attention paid to this issue is also surprising given suggestions that the introduction of highly effective contraceptive methods, such as the birth control pill, which also temporally separate decisions about sex from childbearing, facilitated growth in cohabitation among the unmarried (e.g., Cherlin, 2009; Nock, 2005; Thornton, Axinn, & Xie, 2007). This argument presumes high usage rates of such methods among cohabitors, although again relatively little empirical evidence exists regarding cohabiting women's use of contraceptives. The current analysis sheds much needed light on patterns of contraceptive use among cohabitors, thus informing debates regarding change and variation in the relative meanings of cohabitation and marriage in the United States. Two overarching questions guide this research. First, I ask whether cohabiting women are more likely than married women to use modern contraceptive methods. I explore whether this association has changed over time, potentially pointing to a shift in the relative acceptability of cohabitation as a setting for childbearing. Second, I ask whether the association between union status and contraceptive use tends to vary across groups defined by education, race, and ethnicity. The latter question speaks to broader debates regarding "diverging destinies" across social class, race, and ethnic groups with respect to family behavior in the United States (e.g., Ellwood & Jencks, 2004; Martin, 2004; McLanahan, 2004). BACKGROUND A long tradition of family scholarship highlights the importance of marriage as a setting for childbearing, although recent discussions about the nature of family change in industrialized countries emphasize a shifting relationship between union status and reproductive behavior. …