Alabama's Cultural Indicators: Family

The Alabama Policy Institute conducts research regarding cultural indicators and publishes them every year.

Cultural Indicators 2014 for Alabama and the United States tracks various Alabama-specific and national measures of societal well-being dating back to 1960, as statistics are available. Chapters are devoted to:

vital statistics
crime
education
family
health
poverty and welfare
business and government

Marriage

In 1960, married couples made up about 75% of all households in the United States. By 2010, that number had fallen to 49.7%.

In 2012, there were 38,489 marriages in Alabama, a 9% decline from 40,523 marriages in 2011. This translates to a marriage rate of 8.0 marriages per 1,000 population.

Between 1960 and 2012, Alabama's highest marriage rate of 14.1 marriages per 1,000 population was achieved in 1972. Since then, the state's marriage rate has fallen by 43%.

In 2009 - the most recent year for which national figures are available - Alabama's marriage rate was 23% higher than the national average of 6.8 marriages per 1,000 population. Alabama's marriage was the 7th highest in the nation, and the state's marriage rate has been above the national average since before 1960.

Divorce

In 2012, Alabama had 17,193 divorces, for a divorce rate of 3.6 per 1,000 population. This is down about 1% from 2011, when there were 20,550 divorces in the state.

in 2011 - the most recent year national figures are available - the state's divorce rate (4.3 in 2011) was 19% avoce the national average of 3.6. Alabama's divorce rate has been above the national average for more than 50 years.

In 2009, Alabama had the ninth highest divorce rate in the nation.

Alabama's divorce rate was also higher than at least three neighboring states that reported divorce rates:

Florida (4.3)
Mississippi (4.1)
Tennessee (4.1)

Between 1960 and 1966, Alabama's divorce rate fell from 5.3 per 1,000 population to a low of 3.2 in 1966, before rising to a record high of both 1979 and 1980.

In 2012, the median length of marriage before divorce in Alabama was between five and nine years. Ninety-eight percent of these divorces were on the grounds of either "incompatibility" or "irretrievable breakdown" also known as "no-fault divorce".

Children Affected by Divorce

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of divorce is its effect on the children involved. For the past 44 years, about 23,500 couple have divorced in Alabama each year, splitting the homes of about 19,100 children annually.

Even if none of these divorces involved a subsequent divorce (or more than one) for one of the parent, almost 825,000 children in Alabama have been directly affected by divorce since 1970.

The number of children affected by divorce in Alabama closely mirrors the state's divorce rate. During the initial surge in divorce following the legalization of no-fault divorce in Alabama in 1971, the number of children affected grew at a rate of about 400 per year until reaching a historic peak in the late 1970s. Since then, it has fallen by about 160 per year.

Births to Unwed Mothers

Since 1960, the number of births in Alabama that were out of wedlock jumped 272% from 11% to 43% in 2012. Nationwide, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births has increased 673%, from 5% to 41%.

Over the past 50 years, 863,000 children in Alabama and more than 48 million children nationwide have been born to an unmarried mother.

In 1960, 2% of births to white mothers in Alabama were out of wedlock. That number rose to 28% in 2012, an eleven-fold increase (1,171%). By comparison, the percentage of births to unwed, non-white women has leveled out after growing for more than 30 years. In 2012, 71% of all children born in Alabama to non-white mothers were born out of wedlock, compared to 28% in 1960, a 153% increase.

While the problem of unwed parents is usually discussed as it pertains to teenagers, adult out-of-wedlock births in Alabama are increasing at a faster rate than teens. Since 2000, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births to mothers ages 15-19 has increased from 71% of all births to 83$ in 2012. By comparison, the percentages of out-of-wedlock births to mothers between the ages of 20-24 has increased from 45% in 2000 to 60% in 2012; and the percentage of women ages 25-29 increased from 12% in 2000 to 22% in 2012.

Abortion Rates

Half of the pregnancies among American women are unintended, and about four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion. From 1973 to 2011, nearly 53 million legal abortions were performed in America. Forty-five percent of all abortions since 1973 have been for women who were not married at the time of procedure.

According to Alabama's Department of Public Health, there were 9,076 abortions performed in the state in 2012, or about one abortion for every 6.4 births. Fourteen percent of all abortions in Alabama were performed on teenagers.

In 2011, Alabama ranked 33rd in the nation in abortions. The state's abortion rate (10 abortions per 1,000 women ages 15-44) was lower than the rates of:

Florida (23.7)
Georgia (16.8)
Tennessee (13.1)

Nationally, an estimated 1.06 million abortions were performed in 2011, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based organization that gathers voluntary reports from abortion providers. The number of abortions performed in Alabama from 1986 to 1991 are estimates because it was not until 1992 that the state law required full reporting from the providers of abortion services.

More than 533,000 abortions have been performed in the state since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. This number is equal to almost half the population of the Birmingham-Hoover Metropolitan Statistical Area (1,140,300 in 2013).