The U.S. Census Bureau has released a new report showing that the percentage of women who gave birth while unmarried declined over the past decade. According to the report, titled Social and Economic Characteristics of Currently Unmarried Women With a Recent Birth: 2023, 30.9% of women with a recent birth were unmarried in 2023, down from 35.7% in 2011.
In total, four million women ages 15 to 50 gave birth in the last year. Of the 1.2 million women with a recent birth who were unmarried, about 35.5%, or roughly 450,000, lived with an unmarried partner.
The findings are based on data from the 2023 American Community Survey (ACS), which also allows for comparisons to similar data collected in 2011.
From 2011 to 2023, either decreases or no statistically significant changes were observed in the percentage of women with a recent birth who were unmarried across all U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
Teen births among unmarried women also declined sharply. In 2023, 90.1% of women ages 15 to 19 who had given birth in the last year were unmarried; however, their numbers dropped from more than 216,000 in 2011 to just over 82,500 in 2023.
Educational attainment was also examined. In both years studied, nearly half of women with less than a high school education or only a high school diploma or GED who had recently given birth were unmarried. The share for those without a high school diploma fell from about 57% in 2011 to nearly half by 2023; there was no significant change for high school graduates or GED holders during this period.
Additionally, more mothers with bachelor’s degrees had recent births in 2023 compared to twelve years earlier—11.4% versus just under nine percent.
Geographically, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas and West Virginia reported higher-than-average percentages of recent births among unmarried women compared to national figures. States such as Colorado and Minnesota reported lower-than-average rates.
Further information on fertility statistics can be found at the Census Bureau’s Fertility webpage: https://www.census.gov/topics/health/fertility.html
