Divorce and Illegitimate Children


Part of the Divorce Statistics Collection, from Americans for Divorce Reform
Legislation | Statistics | Articles/Opinion | Quotations | Polls | Other family-related articles
Send Us More Statistics!

There is a separate page on children of divorce having illegitimate children


Australian divorce, illegitimacy and non-marriage, and the economic effects

"14% of white women who married in the 1940s eventually divorced. A single generation later, almost 50 percent of those that married in the late sixties and early seventies have already divorced" ... Between 1970 and 1992, the proportion of babies born outside of marriage leaped from 11% to 30%."
Amara Bachu, Fertility of American Women: June 1994 (Washington D.C.: Bureau of the Census, September 1995), xix, Table K. Cited on page5 ofThe Abolition of Marriage, by Maggie Gallagher

"The voices of despair argue that times have changed, that underlying forces ripping our marriages apart are too powerful to resist. A quick scan of international data, however, suggests that marriage and modernity are not nearly so incompatible as the divorce advocates would have us believe. Germany, for example, has a illegitimacy rate of 15 percent, half of that of America's. In Italy the rate is 7 percent. In today's Japan, just 1 percent of babies are born outside of marriage, the same proportion as in 1970,"
The Abolition of Marriage, by Maggie Gallagher, page11, Citing Bachu, Fertility of American Women, xix, Table K.

The illegitimacy rate has increased 66% since 1980 and is still growing.
See Larry L. Bumpass, "What's Happening to the Family: Interaction Between Demographic and Institutional Change," Demography 27 (1990): 483-498. Cited on page11 ofThe Abolition of Marriage, by Maggie Gallagher

"By 1994, 40% of never-married women in their thirties had had an illegitimate child."
Fertility of American Women: June 1994, v. Cited on page5 ofThe Abolition of Marriage, by Maggie Gallagher

Legislation | Statistics | Articles/Opinion | Quotations | Polls | Other family-related articles
Part of the Divorce Reform Page, sponsored by Americans for Divorce Reform
divorcereform@usa.net
John Crouch, Executive Director
Colleen Fannin Arnold, President
(703) 528-6700
To join, send $25.00 to Americans for Divorce Reform
1300 N. Utah St.
Arlington, Virginia 22201