How old is she?
Probably a bigger deal that she’s not sure who the daddy is. Is my daughter a slut?
I think there’s still some stigma to the parents. But not as much as they’re used to be. And I think the emphasis has shifted. It’s now seen more as a dumb mistake (“Why didn’t you use birth control?”) rather than a moral failing (“How could you have sex before you were married?”).
One good development is I don’t think there’s any stigma placed on the child anymore.
I had heard that in the past illegitimate kids could carry that stigma with them their entire life. Getting denied entry into social circles, fraternities, and clubs. Or they were allowed in but were the targets of cruel comments.
That must of been well before I was born. I never heard any comments about my classmates or friends. Other than using the occasional curse word bastard.
Its hard to understand today why a child would be stigmatized like that. They obviously were not responsible for what their parents did. The circumstances of their birth doesn’t define who they are.
I’ll tell you what it’s like.
When I was born in 1970s India, I was born out of wedlock. My dad was already married and my mom, a college student - his student.
Dad had a couple of other kids. Anyway, he pretty much dumped my mom once he found out she was pregnant, and not only that, when it was discovered I was a girl, positively disowned me.
When my aunt came to get me my mom and I were living in a one-room shack and I had nothing to wear but a single dirty t-shirt and cloth diapers. (Mom had to leave school so as not to corrupt the other girls). The place was pretty crappy because almost no one would rent to single mothers.
My aunt was engaged to be married. When the future family found out, they broke off the engagement, saying that they did not want to be married into a family with such clear immorality.
My family loved me and took care of me - I was an uncommonly cute baby 
- but it was agreed by one and all that growing up in India would be bad for me. The stigma of being born into sin would follow me all my life. Men would assume I was loose and slutty. Women wouldn’t marry their sons to me. Etc.
So I was brought to the States. Here illegitimacy is barely a concept. I mean, people may have talked trash to my mother, but no one ever pointed their fingers at me. It was assumed I was an innocent victim.
The way that Indians would have acted to a girl born out of wedlock is not far removed from the way we used to act here, too. Thankfully it’s a lot more in the past. So the best thing my parents ever did for me was bring me here…and the only people I have felt that stigma from are my adopted parents and the Indian community. And yes, I still have felt it from there.
The problem is, the stigma all goes to the Mom. Dad can up and disappear, as my dad did. As far as I know, nothing ever came home to him and he never once had to confront the fact that he had an illegitimate child and threw her away.
And as I mentioned before, the person whose fault it is least of all is mine, of course, but I am the one who would have had to pay for it. In the 70s a movie was made in India called “Lawaaris” - which addressed this exact issue. In it, a young man is born out of wedlock. His father is a rich man; his mother, a dancer/singer. It shows a lot of his trials and travails. It ends in a happy ending, but it is clearly tacked on - in the last five minutes only does the dad accept him. The rest is a pretty unrelenting look at what faces illegitimate young men in India.
Young women, if not protected by their families as I was, usually end up in the brothels. 
Shodan. thank you for your clarification.
It’s terrible that you experienced such bigotry and cruelty. I’m so glad that you moved to the US and a new life.
Thank you for sharing your story.
I’m very lucky, aceplace. I shudder to think of all of the other girls who didn’t have the opportunities I had.
More to the point, if she’s not protecting herself from pregnancy, she’s not protecting herself from disease, which might be OK in a monogamous relationship where she and her partner know each other well, and were tested, but absolutely not OK if she’s sleeping around.
I don’t know if it was all over the US, but at least in some states, up until about WWI, “Illegitimate” was stamped not only on your birth certificate, but any other document that concerned you, such as your marriage license. Also, in many states, women had to pay a fine (it was around $5, but that was a lot more money then) if they delivered a child out of wedlock. That lasted until about WWI as well.
The stigma of the child was very burdensome, and actually, there was one person, a woman named Edna Gladney, who was born out of wedlock herself, was an early activist in lifting the stigma from the children. Most people seeking to adopt a child would not adopt a child known to be illegitimate, because even a child adopted by married people was still followed by the word “illegitimate,” and Gladney successfully had this law repealed, at least in her state of Texas, so women who wished to give up out-of-wedlock children for adoption could do so knowing they had a much better chance of being adopted by people who wanted to be parents, not by people looking for a free scullery maid. Basically, Gladney invented the adoption we have today, where unrelated people are allowed to form a parent-child bond. In the 1950s, she lobbied to make it a matter of law that any adopted child had the same inheritance rights as a biological child, without the parents needing a special clause in their will.
Ironically, in a biopic about Gladney starring Greer Garson (think Meryl Streep of the WWII era, if you haven’t heard of her), they decided not to mention her own illegitimacy, and invented an adopted sister for her who was illegitimate.
I didn’t know that- and it isn’t on my aunt’s birth certificate, born to my grandmother in Vermont 12/13/14 (easy to remember b-day, and she would be 100 soon!) The father’s name is there but they were 16 and 17 and not married. Grandma moved to another state when Auntie was two, and in the four season vacation town where she moved, worked as a hired girl in a boardinghouse catering to tourists. I gather she was considered a fallen woman; she married the younger son of the house (my grandfather) and did not have a child until they were married two full years. Auntie had five husbands- and when I asked her why, said she had drummed into her that she absolutely could not “sleep” with a man unless she was married to him. She seemed comfortable enough in the town, leaving it for Boston only for the two years her first marriage lasted. Grandma also was eventually accepted- she was a truly kind woman and a fantastic cook. (She took me aside when I was 14 and told me not to let boys feed me likker ;))
Nowadays, where I am, there seems to be very little stigma for the mom, none for the dad, and no designation at all for the child. Oldest grandson was a tad over a year when his parents married, three plus when they divorced. His half sister and brother’s dad and my daughter plan to marry formally fairly soon- I kinda think for the big party! SIL#2’s family are pretty religious, but you never hear a peep about the marital status, just joy in the happy pairing and ooh-ahs for the kids.
While I think there is still some stigma attached to it, I agree that it is mostly “How dumb were you not to use birth control?” and not “How immoral to sleep together before marriage!”
But as far as meeting a single woman with a child, when one does, there is no way to know immediately if she is divorced, or never married. She may even be widowed, and not wearing a ring, if she is young, and interested in dating again, or wearing it on her right hand, or on a chain on her neck, and it may not register as a “wedding ring,” particularly since so many people don’t get plain gold bands (which would be a great name for a band) anymore-- a patterned ring with settings on one’s right finger isn’t going to shout “widow!” on a young woman, the way a plain gold band on the right finger of an elderly woman does.
I don’t know what is the most common-- young widows is certainly the least common, but a randomly selected young woman with say, a five-year-old really cannot be assumed to be married, divorced, or never-married. Heck, the child could even be adopted, since single people can do that now, or she could have a baster-baby, which is technically a child born out of wedlock, but without the “sinning” part that used to make illegitimacy shameful, or the “duh-- condoms” part that stigmatizes it now. She could for that matter be a married lesbian whose partner just isn’t there at the moment, with a baster-baby, technically born IN wedlock. I think that the non-birthing female spouse of a woman who gives birth gets the same marital presumption a man would get, even though it’s obviously not possible she is the father, but she gets her name on the birth certificate without needing to formally adopt the child, as long as the wedding happens before the birth.
If you are still reading, my point is that there really is no way to know the status of a woman alone with a child: Oops! divorce, death, adoption, miracle of modern science, it could be anything. Unless and until you get to know her, you don’t know the particulars, and if you get to know her, one presumes by the time you find out, you won’t care.
Wait, I’m confused. Who was this “family” that supported you that you speak of since you say above that your mother had been living alone. Are you talking your Mom and aunt? Had your Mom remarried? Did you and your mother move to the USA by yourselves?
Have you had better support in or out of the American-Indian community?
This is what I’d expect any church worth it salt to say, and minus the ‘not the ideal situation’, it’w what I’d say myself. Having a child is a good thing and should be a celebratory occasion, and more specifically, anyone who has a child out of marriage is probably someone who faced temptations to have an abortion, and overcame them.
I’m sure there are people who stigmatize pregnancies and/or births out of wedlock, but I think it says more about them than about the person being stigmatized.
More clarity: There are three sisters. I was born to the youngest sister. My aunt is the one whose engagement was broken. The eldest sister had already emigrated to the States by then, and it transpired that she was unable to have biological children anyway. So I was adopted by her and her husband. The “family” that supported me was my aunt and my two uncles. My mother was living alone because she hadn’t told anyone of her situation, but once the family found out, they took her in because of duty and responsibility and not to let me starve in the streets.
I didn’t want to go into all of the details purely out of laziness. Sorry for the confusion!
Stigma for the child was actually one of those things that I was surprised was a thing. I sure didn’t see it growing up, and I had friends who had single mothers.
There was a stigma on the mother for getting pregnant. I remember single pregnant women having trouble keeping friends. (In school, I was always on the lookout for people who seemed to not have friends.) I’m not sure about stigma on the father, though I can think of some guys I personally thought were slime. But this had to do with convincing the girl that they were in a relationship, but then bailing.
My wife got pregnant her freshman year at college (1994) by a fellow student. It was a very strictly religious college and premarital sex (of which she was now walking evidence, of course) might well have been grounds for expulsion, but in any event would have been so stigmatizing that she withdrew from school before they could do so.
She moved back in with her parents, who presented her with one option: carrying the baby to term and placing it for adoption. Abortion would have been absolutely out of the question in that family, and marrying the father or raising the child herself as a single mother were not even mooted. The family more or less hid her for the final months of the pregnancy, when her condition would have been obvious. When people came by, she simply stayed upstairs in her room. (Years later, neighbors, family friends, and members of their congregation were surprised to hear this story, never having known at the time that she had been pregnant.)
She had the baby at the local hospital under an assumed name, because too many people worked at the hospital who knew her family and would have recognized her name. The baby, a son, was adopted by a local (~25 miles away) family (under an assumed name as well) a few days later. All parties agreed to have the record unsealed on the boy’s 21st birthday, so that if he so chose, he could contact his birth mother at that time.
My future wife, already clinically depressed, became nearly suicidal when postpartum depression and the guilt and loss feelings associated with giving up a child were piled onto her already very full emotional plate. I harbor real resentment towards her parents for how they handled the whole situation, even though it was 15 years before I would meet her.
Of course in 1994 the internet was in its infancy, and social media as we know it now was still nearly a decade away. So imagine our surprise when, through a bit of search-fu and some savvy, birthson found my wife on Facebook last year, nearly two years short of the official unsealing of the records. (That became a brutal and harrowing ordeal all its own for all concerned, involving midnight ER trips, attempted suicide, and a case of military AWOL, but that’s probably a story for another thread.)
But all of that is to say that in many cultures and parts of the country, pregnancy out of wedlock continues to be very socially shameful. In the place where my wife’s story took place, 2014 would not look upon a situation like hers any differently than 1994 did.
The marvels of the English language: one can simultaneously fuck, and fuck up.
A lot of times fathers want to be involved or have “legitimate” births but are basically seen as sperm donors regardless. If anything it’s more fashionable for women to have kids with no involvement from the father, at their insistence not the father’s.
I definitely felt it as a child in the 1980s.
Silly women wanting to raise children by themselves because it’s all trendy and stuff, amirite?
And guys are trying to do the right thing. Within reason of course. We ain’t talking nonsense like paying child support or watching the kid on a daily basis. But a guy wants to take his kid to a baseball game or something when he feels like it and that bitch acts like he ain’t even trying to be a good dad.
Yep, that trend is also growing and significant.
Though, in the UK, there is still some reservation in the middle classes where family in the context of marriage is still the dominent culture.