Just Not the Marrying Kind

A deepening trend in out-of-wedlock births shouldn't be impossible to reverse

Chad Hagen for TIME

The old schoolyard taunt "first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage" badly needs a rewrite.

A front-page New York Times article put an exclamation point on a decades-long trend when it reported that more than half of births to mothers under age 30 now occur out of wedlock. We are casting aside the institution of marriage and with it the notion that children should be raised in stable two-parent families. This is a social catastrophe.

The benchmark for discussions of illegitimacy is always the controversial 1965 report on the perilous state of the black family...

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