And from divorce rates to teen births, nearly every indicator of family life now varies dramatically by education, race, geography and income.
In a rare convergence, conservatives and liberals basically agree on how this happened. First, the sexual revolution overturned the old order of single-earner households, early marriages, and stigmas against divorce and unwed motherhood.
In its aftermath, the professional classes found a new equilibrium. Today, couples with college and (especially) graduate degrees tend to cohabit early and marry late, delay childbirth and raise smaller families than their parents, while enjoying low divorce rates and bearing relatively few children out of wedlock.
For the rest of the country, this comfortable equilibrium remains out of reach. In the underclass (black, white and Hispanic alike), intact families are an endangered species.
For middle America, the ideal endures, but the reality is much more chaotic: early marriages coexist with frequent divorces, and the out-of-wedlock birth rate keeps inching upward.
When it comes to drawing lessons from this story, though, the agreement between liberals and conservatives ends.
The right tends to emphasize what’s been lost, arguing that most Americans — especially the poor and working-class — would benefit from a stronger link between sex, marriage and procreation.
The left argues that the revolution just hasn’t been completed yet: It’s the right-wing backlash against abortion, contraception and sex education that’s preventing downscale Americans from attaining the new upper-middle-class stability.
This is one of the themes of “Red Families v. Blue Families,” a provocative new book by law professors, Naomi Cahn and June Carbone. The authors depict a culturally conservative “red America” trying to sustain an outdated social model.
By insisting (unrealistically) on chastity before marriage, Cahn and Carbone argue, social conservatives guarantee that their children will get pregnant early and often, leading to teen births, shotgun marriages and high divorce rates.
This self-defeating cycle could explain why socially conservative states have more family instability than, say, the culturally liberal Northeast.
But Cahn and Carbone also acknowledge one of the more polarizing aspects of the “blue family” model. Conservative states may have more teen births and more divorces, but liberal states have many more abortions.
Overall, New York’s abortion rate is twice that of Texas; in Massachusetts, it’s three times as high as Utah.
So it isn’t just contraception that delays childbearing in liberal states, and it isn’t just a foolish devotion to abstinence education that leads to teen births and hasty marriages in conservative America. It’s also a matter of how plausible an option abortion seems, depending on who and where you are.
Whether it’s attainable for most Americans or not, the “blue family” model clearly works: It leads to marital success and material prosperity.
By comparison, the “red family” model can look dysfunctional — an uneasy mix of rigor and permissiveness.
But it reflects something else as well: an attempt, however compromised, to navigate post-sexual revolution America without relying on abortion.
Ross Douthat writes for the New York Times.