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Ideational and Economic Causes of the Rise in Non-marital Childbearing in the Czech Republic

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Abstract

This paper analyses the increase in non-marital childbearing in the Czech Republic during the first two decades following the demise of state socialism. The proportion of mothers who gave birth as unmarried increased more than fourfold during this period. The aim is to explain the reasons for this increase and its socioeconomic variation. Three explanations are tested: growing individualisation, increasing economic uncertainty, and adjustment to a policy that provided more support for single mothers. Data, taken from the national birth register, regarding the marital status of mothers are used to estimate multilevel models with contexts defined by combinations of regions and years. The results are most in line with the first explanation: the change in values due to a rise in individualism and personal autonomy. Economic uncertainty is also found to have a moderate effect among women with up to a secondary education, especially the lower (vocational) level. The influence of policy is weak and is limited to mothers with the lowest level of education.

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Notes

  1. Perelli-Harris and Gerber (2011) emphasise the role of feminist and liberal movements that empowered women to refuse marriage if their partners do not meet their standards.

  2. The period of maternity leave was already cut to 28 weeks for single mothers in 2007; however, the amendment of the allowance was delayed; therefore, the financial benefit remained until 2009.

  3. Conversely, legitimate single motherhood is never financially advantageous, even when the partner is unemployed (Soukupová 2007). Thus, the policy supporting single mothers is not likely to have motivated them to remain unpartnered. An assessment of the household composition of unmarried mothers is, however, beyond the scope of this paper, because data on cohabitation status are unavailable.

  4. The authors found that while macroeconomic uncertainty caused people to postpone family commitments, individual job insecurity did not have this effect in the Netherlands.

  5. It is impossible to identify mothers who had subsequent children in different years; therefore, each birth event is treated as independent.

  6. I also estimated all models for the divorced/widowed versus married category separately. The effects of context-level variables were much weaker but showed patterns that were similar to the models for never-married versus married mothers. The results are available upon request from the author.

  7. The regions were established in 2000, but they follow the borders of districts, so they remain consistent across years.

  8. The educational pattern seems to be universal across the formerly socialist countries of Central Europe; see Brzozowska (2014) or Potančoková et al. (2008).

  9. Roma women differ from the majority population by engaging in earlier and universal family formation, and they tend to have more children (Sobotka et al. 2008: 425–426). Roma face discrimination in education (Nekorjak et al. 2011) and are often socially excluded (Kotýnková 2000).

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Dana Hamplová, Martin Kreidl, Tomáš Sobotka, Kryštof Zeman, and two anonymous reviewers for commenting on earlier versions of the text. Work on the paper was supported by the Motivation Programme of the University of West Bohemia, part POSTDOC.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of West Bohemia, Univerzitní 8, 306 14, Pilsen, Czech Republic

    Martina Štípková

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Štípková, M. Ideational and Economic Causes of the Rise in Non-marital Childbearing in the Czech Republic. Eur J Population 31, 473–494 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-015-9350-4

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