NZ is another country where the culture is such that there are many, many long term happily committed couples making kids together who simply see no reason for becoming married. So they don’t.
In NZ as I understand it that’s partially down to them not being all Baptist prudish like Americans, and partly down to legislation that largely eliminates any legal or tax distinction between long term cohabitation and marriage.
That was my immediate first thought. At best, the term is judgmental, archaic, and obsolete.
You left out “misspelled”. Which is by far the worst part.
It’s also not uncommon for thise early cohabitations (without benefit of matrimony) to dissolve fairly quickly and the parents move on to other partners. Also, there does not traditionally seem to be a strong moral disapproval of cohabitation or children born out of wedlock. Due to its small popluation, and this churning of partners, a child might be raised mainly regarding the step-parent as their parent and have little or no contact with the departed father and any subsequent half-siblings, let alone extended family like cousins. Apparently there’s an app for that - two Icelanders can check a phone app to see if they are too closely related to start a relationship and/or have children.
Which was what I was saying when I said that in Iceland it’s common for the order to be “to meet in a first date, have sex afterwards, get to know each other on later dates, then move in together, then have children, then finally get around to getting married.” It’s a matter of the culture in the country. In the U.S., the present culture and the culture sixty years ago are described here:
I’m not sure what the article is trying to say. It claims perhaps that the availability of brith control and abortion meant that the need to get married in the event of a pregnancy was much reduced, so social pressure to marry has disappeared - it does not seem to delve into the difference between unmaried as in cohabitating vs. single women. Single parent also involves divorced or separated couples, which do not figure into this analysis.
It also mentions the welfare problem, but ignores the basic issue that welfare was for families - so if a man married or cohabitated with a woman, she was not eligible for benefits and the man was expected to provide. It’s not hard to see this drives an obvious behaviour, that the man not live with the mother, even if they carry on a relationship and total financial situation is much mproved. News stories of the 60’s and later commonly referenced welfare officials trying to divine if the woman had “overnight guests” with the threat that the welfare benefits would be cut off if it could be proved. Perhaps the drive in the last few decades to chase down males for child support and reduce welfare benefits has also reduced this phenomena.
The study also mentions shortage of low income jobs for less educated men, but ignores a serious social problem - the USA is prison-crazy. It incarcerates a larger number of people than any other country (depending on how you classify some “detainees” in China). Most of these are are minorities, based on a bias in the war on drugs; many are non-violent offenders and many are in the primary age for marriage, 20’s. I recall an article (NYT) talking about how hard it was for educated black women to find a partner - fewer eligible, working, free black men. (A statistic said about 20% of men that age group were incarcerated) One woman complained when she caught her boyfriend sleeping around, he told he “I didn;t realize this was an exclusive thing”. Men had the upper hand.
But the main upshot of the OP’s question is that unattached women today have options before, during, and after getting pregnant; and social pressure to give up the child or get married is long gone. Having the child is no longer the choice by default.
A flip side too is that divorce and separation are easier, more common and more accepted - so a woman who got married because she was pregnant will possibly end up a single mother, which confuses those statistic.
it’s a different world.