Rk. Raley, Increasing fertility in cohabiting unions: Evidence for the second demographic transition in the United States?, DEMOGRAPHY, 38(1), 2001, pp. 59-66
As cohabitation becomes increasingly common and accepted, one might expect
the meaning of this arrangement to change. In some countries in Europe (e.g
, Sweden), as cohabitation became more prevalent, it moved from a deviant s
tatus to an acceptable alternative to marriage. Will the same thing happen
in the United States? To investigate this question, I examine increases in
the proportion of births occurring in cohabiting unions, using data from th
e 1987-1988 National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) and the 1995
National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). The standardization and decomposit
ion procedure shows that most of the growth in the proportion of births to
cohabiters is the result of increases in the proportion of women cohabiting
, rather than changes in union formation behaviors surrounding pregnancies.