The percentage of women who gave birth while unmarried has declined over the past decade, according to a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau. The report, titled “Social and Economic Characteristics of Currently Unmarried Women With a Recent Birth: 2023,” found that in 2023, 30.9% of women with a recent birth were unmarried, down from 35.7% in 2011.
In 2023, four million women between ages 15 and 50 gave birth in the previous year. Of these, about 1.2 million were unmarried at the time of their child’s birth. Among this group, roughly 35.5%, or about 450,000 women, lived with an unmarried partner.
The analysis used data from the American Community Survey (ACS) for both years to examine social and economic characteristics among unmarried mothers and compared them to findings from an earlier report based on data from 2011.
The decrease in births to unmarried women was observed across every state and the District of Columbia between 2011 and 2023; where there was no decrease, the change was not statistically significant.
Teenage births also showed a shift: In 2023, approximately nine out of ten (90.1%) young women ages 15 to 19 who had given birth in the last year were unmarried. However, the total number of such teenage mothers dropped by more than half during this period—from over 216,000 in 2011 to just under 83,000 in 2023.
Education levels correlated with marital status among new mothers as well. In both years studied:
– Nearly half of women with less than a high school education or only a high school diploma or GED who gave birth were unmarried.
– The proportion of those with less than a high school education who were unmarried fell notably from nearly six out of ten (57%) in 2011 to just under half (48.9%) in 2023.
– There was no significant change for high school graduates or GED holders.
– The share of new mothers holding at least a bachelor’s degree increased modestly from under nine percent (8.8%) in 2011 to over eleven percent (11.4%) by last year.
Geographically, states such as Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas and West Virginia reported higher-than-average rates of births among unmarried women when compared nationally. Conversely Colorado and several other states—including Minnesota and Washington—had lower rates than average.
For further details on fertility statistics collected by the Census Bureau visit their Fertility webpage at https://www.census.gov/topics/health/fertility.html.
