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The Illegitimacy Revolution. About 33 percent of children in America are born to unwed mothers. This rate has held fairly constant since 1994 but contrasts strikingly to figures from 1970 (10.7 percent), 1980 (18.4 percent), and even 1990 (28 percent).

Forty years after the pill was supposed to have eliminated unwanted pregnancy, an estimated half of all U.S. pregnancies are unintended. If 22 percent of all pregnancies end in abortion, according to the most recent statistics, then we can well imagine how many of the unintended pregnancies do so. And many of the remaining unintended pregnancies carried to term contribute to the 33 percent out-of-wedlock birthrate.

Sometime in the 1970s, describing this phenomenon as "illegitimacy" came to be viewed as insensitive or oppressive. Sometime in the 1980s, it also became viewed as prehistoric to describe this out-of-wedlock birth phenomenon as a problem. By the mid-1990s, the findings of social scientists about the diminished life-chances of out-of-wedlock children and their mothers made it respectable, in some circles at least, to begin questioning the circumstances of such births again.

But by then, damage to marriage as an institution had been done. If one of marriage's key purposes had been to provide a framework of family relations for a child's world, then the illegitimacy revolution marked the crumbling of this pillar.

The Cohabitation Revolution. Related to all of the above was the simultaneous cohabitation revolution. Today more than 4 million U.S. unmarried couples live together. Many do so as a trial run for matrimony, but, sadly, cohabitation fails to prepare couples well for marriage.

According to Linda Waite, a leading researcher on this issue, "Cohabitation isn't marriage, and cohabitating people don't act the same way as married people do. They don't have the same characteristics; they don't get the same benefits; and they don't get to pay the same costs."

Studies show that many couples expecting to marry never do—the average length of a cohabitation relationship is a little more than a year. Those live-in relationships that do result in marriage are much more likely than other marriages to end in divorce. Cohabitating partners suffer higher levels of conflict, domestic violence, abuse, and infidelity than married partners do.

More than a third of all cohabitating couples share their homes with children under the age of 15, according to 1998 Census Bureau statistics. These domestic arrangements are rarely placid. Relationships between live-ins and the children of their partners are less stable and satisfying, and far more prone to sexual and physical abuse (including assault and murder), than in families where the adults are married to each other. In a study by Leslie Margolin of the University of Iowa, boyfriends were 27 times more likely than natural parents to abuse a child.

Whatever the dynamics driving this pattern of abuse, the results are clear, as Heather MacDonald so memorably puts it: "The risks to children living outside a two-parent home go beyond social failure, as [we] witness [in] New York City's never-ending cortege of tiny coffins containing children beaten, suffocated, and scalded by their mothers' boyfriends."

The Reproduction Revolution. Since 1978, when the first test-tube baby was born through in vitro fertilization, dozens of assisted reproduction techniques have been developed. While the failure rate remains quite high, this industry offers enough successes to continue to attract tens of thousands of anxious and hopeful couples each year.

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September 2004, Vol. 48, No. 9