Nonmarital Births: As Rates Soar, Theories Abound; Levels Once Seen as Aberration Among Blacks Have Become `Norm for the Entire Culture'
In the summer of 1965, one of the most explosive government reports ever written disclosed that one-quarter of all black children were born out of wedlock.</br></br>The report, by then-Assistant Labor Secretary Daniel Patrick Moynihan, touched off waves of alarm, then defensiveness, then recrimination. The subject proved so sensitive that public policy-makers became convinced there was nothing they could do to address it. Eventually, a protective silence descended.</br></br>Twenty-five years later, there is a new statistic: More than one-quarter of all children born in America are born out of wedlock.</br></br>The black out-of-wedlock rate has more than doubled to 63.5 percent (in 1988, the last year for which figures are available). But the white rate has risen faster, more than quadrupling from just over 4 percent in 1965 to 17.8 percent in 1988. Of all the babies born out of wedlock in 1988, 539,696 were white and 426,665 were black.</br></br>"Illegitimacy levels that were viewed as an aberration of a particular subculture 25 years ago have become the norm for the entire culture," said Moynihan, now a Democratic senator from New York.