Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case

Author:Anne Case
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

Childbearing

Once upon a time, when marriage and childbearing were closely related, a decline in marriage would have meant a decline in childbearing. Indeed, for much of Western history, men’s wage rates were part of the mechanism that regulated fertility.6 Over the last half century, the link between marriage and having children has been broken, or is at least breakable at will. There are many socially permissible routes to sexual intimacy, and safe, convenient, and reliable contraception means that sexual intimacy need not risk pregnancy. Marriage can be postponed without giving up intimate partnerships, and childbearing can be postponed until a career is well established or there is a (relatively) convenient window to take time off for parenting. At the same time, the availability of contraception and on-demand abortion has absolved men from their erstwhile responsibility to marry their pregnant partner, with or without her family holding the traditional shotgun. Out-of-wedlock sex and out-of-wedlock childbearing are no longer socially stigmatized.7

Yet all of this liberation has a dark side, at least for some. For the women who get pregnant but who do not get married when they have a child, many do not stay with or even remain in contact with the father of their child but move on to another man, with whom they may also have children. Cohabitation has increased in other wealthy countries and has also increased in the US among more educated couples. But unstable and fragile serial cohabitations with children are rare elsewhere and rare in America among well-educated women, who generally postpone childbearing until they complete their education and are married.8 To paraphrase sociologist Andrew Cherlin,9 there are now two different modes of transitioning to adulthood. One, among the more educated, involves finishing college, taking a job, and developing a career before marrying and having children. The other, among the less educated, involves serial cohabitation and childbearing out of wedlock. Americans who have had children with multiple partners are most likely to be found among those without a bachelor’s degree.

The sociology literature rightly focuses on the consequences of these patterns for children, who tend to do much worse in fractured, fragile relationships than they would do in intact families where both parents are present. But there are also consequences of serial cohabitation and out-of-wedlock childbearing for the adults; such dysfunctional family arrangements are a prime suspect in the spread of despair.

For the women, one might wonder why they make the choices they do; it is no secret that men are no longer bound by the old rules, and that, if the woman has a child, she is likely to face a cycle of economic hardship, emotional instability, and lack of support from which some will find it hard to escape. Yet they may have limited choices. When so many women are prepared to engage in sexual relationships outside marriage, it undercuts the bargaining power of those who would prefer to wait. Once pregnant, many women do not want to have an abortion, although many do; while the number of abortions is falling rapidly, abortion is not rare.

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