All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (46 page)

There are a thousand things about the changing familial structures that result in later and fewer marriages for women that have critics on all ends of the ideological spectrum panicking. Some of the concern—Women having babies outside of marriage! And so few of them!—that sound like the Jackie Mason joke about the restaurant with terrible food and small portions. But the levels of nationally voiced anxiety about the damage that single and late-married women are doing to themselves and the nation is not at all funny for the women who find themselves caricatured and chastised by columnists and presidents for their part in altering the marital patterns that had for so long restrained them.

It is true that, as women marry later and not at all, and spend the non-wifely portions of their lives doing things besides or in addition to
having children, there are fewer children being born in the United States. The general fertility rate has fallen, hitting an all-time low in 2013, with just 62.5 live births to 1,000 women of childbearing age, close to half the rate in 1957, when the baby boom hit its peak with nearly 123 births per 1,000 women.
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No matter that that baby boom number was a socially constructed, freakishly high modern anomaly, and not a steady norm by which any of us should wisely measure the health of reproductive life in this nation. . . . some people are nonetheless
very
concerned.

Jonathan Last is concerned. His 2013 book,
What to Expect When No One's Expecting,
was subtitled “America's Coming Demographic Disaster.” In a
Wall Street Journal
story about the low fertility rate, echoing the arguments Teddy Roosevelt had made about “race suicide” a hundred years earlier, Last wrote, “The root cause of most of our problems is our declining fertility rate,” and that the fertility decline, while tied to wage stagnation, was also largely the doing of women. “Women began attending college in equal (then greater) numbers than men,” wrote Last. “More important, women began branching out into careers beyond teaching and nursing. And the combination of the birth-control pill and the rise of cohabitation broke the iron triangle linking sex, marriage and childbearing.”
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While careful to note that some of these developments were positives, Last was clear that, “even social development that represents a net good can carry a serious cost.” And that white, educated American women, whom he deems “a good proxy for the middle class,” with their fertility rate of 1.6, meant that “America has its very own one-child policy. And we have chosen it for ourselves.” Conservative columnist Megan McCardle is also concerned, and has warned that those who think that declining birth rates are no big whoop should look no further than Greece, to see “what a country looks like when it becomes inevitable that the future will be poorer than the past: social breakdown, political breakdown, economic catastrophe.”

It's not just conservatives who are concerned. It's also our Democratic president, who does not publicly worry as much about population decline as he does the scourge of single-parented households. In a 2008 guest sermon on Father's Day, Obama framed his argument as a scolding of absent fathers—and specifically black fathers—whom he referred to as “AWOL” and “MIA,” and as “acting like boys.”
He blamed absent fathers as being partially responsible for poorer outcomes for black children, for higher dropout and incarceration and teen pregnancy rates.

Obama was careful to celebrate “heroic” single moms, rightly suggesting that “We need to help all those mothers out there who are raising kids by themselves . . . they need support,” but ultimately concluding that the help they need is “another parent in the home,” because “that's what keeps the foundation . . . of our country strong.” In this, Obama—himself the son of an absent father, and yet the president—was reductively asserting that there is a single healthy and correct model for family, foundation, support. He affirmed that the two-parent, partnered home is the type of home to which we are all to aspire.

As Melissa Harris-Perry wrote about Obama's approach to single-parent homes, “President Obama is right when he points to the importance of loving, involved, financially responsible men in the lives of their children and their communities,” but that he “lacks some imagination when it comes to analyzing the necessary ingredients for childhood success . . . odd given that the recipe is readily apparent in his own biography.” That recipe, Harris-Perry suggested, included “an intergenerational support network, access to quality education, and opportunities for travel and enrichment.”
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Obama is not alone in his conviction that single mothers are bad for kids. A 2010 Pew study showed that 69 percent of Americans believed the increase in single motherhood was a “bad thing for society” and that 61 percent believe a child needs both a mother and a father to grow up happily.
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Other liberal critics, including Gloria Steinem, worry that embracing not just single parenthood but single motherhood as a new normal has worrying implications. “It's really, really, really important that children see men as loving and nurturing parents,” said Steinem, adding that, “It doesn't have to be your biological parent, not even your relative. But if we don't grow up knowing that men can be loving parents, or can parent, can nurture, then we're back in the stew of gender roles where we think only women can be nurturing.”

Of course, societies need time, and generations, to adapt to profound
changes in family structure. When women are freed from old expectations, new ways of coping or reorganizing the world are not instantly in place. We must work to adjust and change. Kathy Edin's follow-up work to
Promises I Can Keep
was a 2013 book on single fathers,
Doing the Best I Can
, written with Timothy Nelson. Edin spent time with inner-city, economically disadvantaged men who were more determined than the absent fathers of previous generations to forge bonds with and take responsibility for their offspring. Human beings change behaviors and then change again to accommodate new patterns. We cannot now simply look around us and say that this is how things will always be.

Yet for those women and men and children who
are
alive now, in today's conditions, these worriers have a serious—a very serious—point, backed up by research. Social scientists at the Brookings Institute found, in 2014, that kids whose mothers were married were far more likely to fare well economically than those of single parents.
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And as Bowling Green social scientist Susan Brown has written, roughly half of all children can now expect to spend some of their lives outside of a married parent family. Brown presents a number of studies that suggest that “Children living with two biological married parents experience better educational, social, cognitive, and behavioral outcomes than do other children, on average.” But, in part because single parenthood is more prevalent in low-income communities, it's difficult to separate how many of the outcomes are influenced by the absence of married parents and how many are influenced by the economic challenges presented by poverty. As Brown writes, “Solo parents (typically mothers) who lack a partner to cooperate and consult with about parenting decisions and stressors tend to exert less control and spend less time with their children although those associations are confounded with socioeconomic disadvantage.”
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As Brown writes, neither marriage by itself nor biology by itself is enough to explain the different outcomes for children in different family structures, and that “the task for future research is to develop more nuanced theory and richer data to decipher the mechanisms driving these differentials.” Part of that theory and data is reliant on accepting new family structures, new roles for women and men, and examining how
these new roles are supported by or thwarted by the social policy that still treats men and women as if they are all married to each other. What we must do is accept that we are living in a new world, and try to make that world more humane for all kinds of individuals, couples, and children.

Katie Roiphe, opinion writer and polemicist who, in her late twenties, described how her cohort of perpetual singletons enjoyed casual sex and professional ambition, but harbored not-so-secret longings for Jane Austen's connubial conclusions, by her early forties found herself the unmarried mother of two children by different men.

Roiphe now writes regularly, and compellingly, about single motherhood. In one
New York Times
piece she noted her own economic and educational privileges, acknowledging that while she may not be a “typical single mother . . . there is no typical single mother any more than there is a typical mother.” It's the persistent ideas that an unmarried mother is one way—an aberrant way—Roiphe argued, “that get in the way of a more rational, open-minded understanding of the variety and richness of different kinds of families.”
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Roiphe cites Sara McLanahan's ongoing Fragile Families studies, which show that the chief risks of single motherhood stem from poverty, and to a lesser extent from the introduction of a series of love interests to the family structure (possibly itself a danger worsened by poverty, with its higher risks that those love interests will be depressed, jobless, abusive, or a toll on the family finances), not from the simple setup of having children and not being married. In fact, Roiphe extrapolates from the Fragile Families study, “a two-parent, financially stable home with stress and conflict would be more destructive to children than a one-parent, financially stable home without stress and conflict.”

“What gets lost in the moralizing conversation,” writes Roiphe, “is that there is a huge, immeasurable variety in households,” and that “no family structure guarantees happiness or ensures misery.”
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Like in-vitro fertilization, egg freezing was not invented as a panacea for single women. In fact, it was developed in the early 1990s by Italian doctors
whose mission was to circumvent the Roman Catholic prohibition on embryo freezing that was preventing married women from using IVF to have kids.
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Until 2012, egg freezing was considered “experimental” by The American Society for Reproductive Medicine; in a 2012 statement, the society declared that in a series of trials, there seemed to be no marked difference between using fresh or frozen eggs in in-vitro fertilization treatments.

While egg freezing, in its early years, wasn't particularly reliable, new flash-freezing technology, called vitrification, which prevents ice crystals from damaging the egg, has raised success rates, which are now around 40 percent.
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And, while the ASRM still does not endorse the procedure “as a means to defer reproductive aging,” clinics are springing up in regions across the nation that are home to high concentrations of single and later-marrying women.

The freezing of eggs, as opposed to embryos, theoretically would allow women to preserve their eggs in advance of having met, or chosen, a man whose sperm they would use to fertilize them. This makes it the perfect technology for single women who still hope to meet a partner, but who do not want to risk losing their fertility in the process.

Like most of the technologies being developed to help women exert control over their reproductive lives, egg freezing does not come without costs, starting with the ten to twenty thousand dollars women must pony up for retrieval, freezing, and storage. The procedure involves hormone injections. There is still very little data showing exactly how effective it might be: Sarah Elizabeth Richards, author of
Motherhood, Rescheduled
, has pointed out that most women freeze eggs as a precaution, not because they are actively planning to use them. As a result, while, by the end of 2013, over ten thousand women had had the procedure, fewer than 1,500 had come back to use their eggs.
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And even though it's a tool that will, potentially, extend a woman's fertile years, it's also one that doesn't work nearly as well once you get past your peak fertility. Women over thirty-eight are often discouraged from freezing eggs that may have already declined in quality enough that freezing them would be a waste.
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That means that, if women are ever to really use egg freezing as a means to reliably extend their fertility, the price has to come down, and
it needs to be an option that's encouraged in the middle of their fertile years, not at the end. That's a tough sell to young women, most of whom do not have or cannot fathom spending the money; do not necessarily want to go through the medical process, and who also want to believe that sometime down the road, they'll be in a position to do it the old-fashioned way. For most women, the idea of children remains tied to the idea of partnership. It's mentally very difficult to pull the two relationships apart in advance of a natural realization that they might not happen along the same timeline.

However, as egg freezing improves as a practice and shows higher success rates, some doctors—and bosses, including ABC anchor Diane Sawyer, who married for the first time at forty-two, and did not have children of her own—are urging women to consider egg freezing earlier. Nicole Noyes, one of the specialists at the NYU clinic to which Sawyer recommends patients, told
Newsweek
that three-quarters of her patients come to her because they aren't ready to have children yet, and that many of them are sent by their parents. One childless woman in her forties told
Newsweek
, “I want to send Diane a basket of flowers for what she's doing.” In 2014, some Silicon Valley companies, including Apple and Facebook, announced that they would begin paying for egg freezing as part of their benefits packages.