From Bastardy to Equality: The Rights of Nonmarital Children and Their Fathers in Comparative Perspective

The decline of the traditional family and the increasing incidence of out-of wedlock births have of late become hotly debated political issues. In the United States the erosion of family values and traditional morality has been blamed for a variety of social and economic ills not only by conservative politicians, but by a number of prominent scholars as well. Indeed, according to the National Center for Health Statistics the proportion of all children born outside marriage had reached 30% in 1992-a rate four times as high as just 25 years earlier (Ventura, 1994).' By 1996, the rate had edged up to 32.4% of all births. As David Murray, an anthropologist at the conservative Heritage Foundation put it: "America is becoming a nation of bastards" (1994:9). But the phenomenon is by no means limited to the United States. It constitutes a rather widespread-though not universal-demographic trend in industrial societies (Bums and Scott, 1994), with rates in Scandinavian countries exceeding the figure causing alarm in the U.S. by a considerable margin (see Table 1). In the United States the link between outof-wedlock births and child poverty has played a prominent role in the welfare reform debate, which culminated in passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (P.L. 104-193). Some commentators have excoriated illegitimacy as the root of all social ills, or at least as a major contributing factor (Wattenberg, 1993; Krauthammer, 1994, Murray D., 1993, 1994; Murray D., 1994). Empirical data showing correlations between out-of- wedlock birth and societal decay serve as ammunition in the ideological and political skirmishes over the family and its future. Along with a calls to re-stigmatize childbearing out of wedlock and to end welfare dependency, some conservatives tout marriage as the obvious solution and as the best anti-poverty program of all (Blankenhorn, 1995; Popenoe,1996). A comparison with other nations readily demonstrates, however, that the relationship between out-of-wedlock births and poverty and is not inevitable. While a surge in nonmarital births has occurred in many industrialized nations, child poverty is a more serious and more pervasive problem in the United States .2 This difference reflects at least in part the greater tolerance for economic inequality in America and comparatively less generous income, welfare, and family support policies. Cross-national comparisons of poverty rates among lone-parent and two-parent families shows this clearly. A study by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that American families with children headed by a married couple had a poverty rate of 17.9% in 1986 (where poverty was defined as 50% or less of the median income for all households with heads 20 to 55 years old) (McFate, 1991:32). The corresponding rate for single-parent families was 53.3% - a gap of 35.4%. In Sweden, by contrast, the poverty rates of both groups were very low and nearly indistinguishable, 5% and 5.5% respectively, in 1987. According to these data the poverty rate of traditional families was more than three times as high in the United States as that of lone parent families in Sweden. For other European nations the discrepancy in poverty rates of families headed by couples and single parents fell somewhere in between these extremes: in the Netherlands: 7.2% vs. 7.5%, in France 10% vs. 15.8%, in the UK 16.6% vs. 18%, and in West Germany 7.1 % vs. 25.5%. Using a slightly different definition of poverty, another cross-national comparison by Timothy M. Smeeding ( 1992) leads to similar conclusions. Many participants in the policy debate, and many social scientific studies that examine the effects of family status for that matter, assume that the desirable correlates of marriage are also causally attributable to it. This is not necessarily so. Before one can prescribe marriage as a remedy for problems attributed to illegitimacy one has to consider that existing marriages (upon which inferences about the beneficial effects of marriage are based) involve not just self-selection into the pool of married people, but a mutual selection of partners, and that the attributes of individuals that play a role in partner-selection are likely to be the same that account for more favorable indicators of well-being in married families. …