Births, Marital and Non

The New York Times has gotten around to covering the story that Charles Murray's new book made popular:

After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

The NYT article mentions something I had missed before.

Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together.

So these are not what I usually think of as "single" mothers. They are mothers in pair-bondings that are (statistically) even more tenuous than the average American marriage! Nonetheless, at least when the child arrives, there's a dad on the scene.

It's almost like common law marriage. But the participants don't consider themselves married.

So when they break up, of course,
there's no need to file for divorce.

But still they're likely to end up in court
if only to settle on child support.