Illegitimacy Epidemic Continues

Recently, The Wall Street Journal and other representatives of the press ballyhooed statistics on declining births to teenage girls. Has an important battle against welfare dependency been won?

It is important not to confuse teenage child bearing with illegitimacy. In reality, births to unmarried teenagers form only a small fraction of the overall problem of illegitimacy.

Only about 10 percent of all illegitimate births are to girls under 18. The bulk of out-of-wedlock childbearing occurs to young adult women aged 19 to 24. Sadly, the Clinton administration and the media trumpet improvements in the relatively small problem of teen pregnancy, while maintaining studious silence on the far larger and more threatening problem if illegitimacy.

The collapse of marriage and the rise of illegitimacy together represent the nation's number one social problem. When the War on Poverty began in the mid-1960s, about 8 percent of American children were born out of wedlock. Today, the number has risen fourfold, to 32 percent.

Illegitimacy is the major underlying cause of welfare dependence. Children born outside wedlock to mothers who do not subsequently marry will receive benefits from the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program for at least half of their childhood. Dependence on AFDC is 1700 percent more frequent among illegitimate children of never-married mothers than among legitimate children raised by intact married couples.

Illegitimacy is also the root cause of child poverty. Children born out of wedlock to mothers who do not subsequently marry will live in poverty for half of their childhood years. By contrast, children born within marriage and raised by intact husband-and-wife couples will be poor only 7 percent of the time.

Crime is also tightly linked to illegitimacy and broken homes. Boys raised in broken homes are six times more likely to engage in criminal activities and end up in jail as are those raised in an intact home by their fathers and mothers.

The recently passed federal welfare reform act recognized that out-of-wedlock child-bearing and broken families are the root cause of most of our nation's social problems. The act made reducing illegitimacy a paramount national goal, and called on governors to take aggressive steps to reduce illegitimacy and restore marriage. The epidemic of illegitimacy remains an immense and threatening problem awaiting a leader with real political courage. To date, no one has stepped up to the plate.

Robert Rector is a welfare expert at The Heritage Foundation.