Weighing the consequences of pregnant teen weddings

As a pregnant teen, Bristol Palin is an anomaly: She’s getting married. Forty or 50 years ago, a wedding was all that stood between a teen mom and a life of economic hardship and social disgrace.

But today, the stigma surrounding unwed mothers isn’t the force it used to be. And few of us think that life without a man dooms a woman to destitution.

In the early 1960s, 70 percent of pregnant white teens got married. By the 1990s, the figure was 20 percent, said Stephanie Coontz, author of 2005’s “How Love Conquered Marriage” and “Marriage: A History.”

Since Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin announced her 17-year-old daughter Bristol is pregnant – and plans to marry her 18-year-old boyfriend, Levi Johnston – teen marriage and teen pregnancy have been hot topics among parents.

Social and economic changes play a role in the decline of “shotgun weddings.” But an important factor is a series of legal decisions that weakened the concept of “illegitimacy.”

“Until the mid-1960s, they had ‘illegitimate’ stamped very often on their birth certificate,” said Coontz, a professor of history at Evergreen State College in Olympia.

“Until 1971, if you were illegitimate, you weren’t likely to inherit money from your father, you couldn’t collect debts owed to your mother, and you couldn’t sue for wrongful death, if she died because you weren’t the ‘real’ child,” said Coontz.

But all that changed after a 1976 Supreme Court ruling, she said. “The thought was that the idea of illegitimacy seemed to punish the child.”

As education and income levels for women started to rise, teen moms felt less dependent on marriage. The age of marriage for all women has increased from 20 in 1960 to 26, said Coontz.

As attitudes toward premarital sex began to shift, there was also less pressure for pregnant girls to wed.

“In the 1970s to 1980s, people began to believe that premarital sex wasn’t necessarily wrong, and the idea that a girl who had sex was ‘ruined’ lessened immensely,” Coontz said.

Today, parents of pregnant teens are more likely to encourage them to have an abortion, put the baby up for adoption or raise the child on their own rather than face a rocky marriage, said Coontz.

“To a son, they might say, ‘You need to step up to the plate financially, but if you don’t love this girl, there’s no sense in a marriage that might end in divorce,’ ” she said.

So far, the Palin family hasn’t commented publicly on whether Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston intended to get married before the pregnancy, or how they felt about having a child together – although Johnson’s MySpace page reportedly informed viewers that, although he was “in a relationship,” he didn’t want children.

When a pregnant teen weds, the odds of a lasting marriage improve, if the pregnancy was desired. “If a child is not intended, the couple tends to experience a lower marital quality after pregnancy, which isn’t the case with planned pregnancies,” said Coontz.

Marriage among couples in their 20s and 30s is far less likely to end in divorce. “One study showed that marrying as a teenager was the single biggest risk factor for divorce,” said David Popenoe, head of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University.

“They tend to break up at two, three, even four times the rate of marriages undertaken when the couple was older,” he said. “People just feel the child isn’t old enough or mature enough, not fully adult. They haven’t completed their education or gotten established in their work life.”

But some factors can improve the odds. Marriages that take place when teens are raised with strong religious values have a slightly better survival rate, said Popenoe and Coontz.

As in any marriage – no matter what the couple’s ages – happiness depends on a host of things, said Popenoe.

“It’s important to have the roles worked out, who does what, and that’s often a process of trial and error. And all the usual things of good communication and problem-solving skills and doing things together, and having a reasonably good sex life and reasonably good income, all those things can make for a happy family life.”