Contraception and Illegitimacy
(I meant to post this yesterday, before I ran out to provide taxi service for 4 kids :-) and found it today. Sorry to the commenters, especially Fitz)
There is a very sophisticated argument by Nobel Prize winning economist George Akerlof that explains the puzzle of why rising out of wedlock births could be associated with increased access to contraception and abortion. His argument is that the availability of contraception, and its widespread social acceptance, changed the dynamic of the pre-marital relationships between men and women. Tradition-minded women, who might have wanted to postphone intercourse until marriage have to compete for relationship with women who are willing to be sexual before marriage. This increases the competitive pressure on even tradional women, to be sexual before marriage. Brad Wilcox summarizes Akerlof's findings:

Traditional women could no longer hold the threat of pregnancy over their male partners, either to avoid sex or to elicit a promise of marriage in the event their partner made them pregnant. And modern women no longer worried about getting pregnant. Accordingly, more and more women (traditional as well as modern) gave in to their boyfriends’ entreaties for sex.

In Akerlof’s words, “the norm of premarital sexual abstinence all but vanished in the wake of the technology shock.” Women felt free or obligated to have sex before marriage. For instance, Akerlof finds that the percentage of girls 16 and under reporting sexual activity surged in 1970 and 1971 as contraception and abortion became common in many states throughout the country.

(Akerlof's original article appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1996, but I haven't found it on-line.)
Also, among the poor, marriage has all but vanished as the socially acceptable context for both sex and child-bearing. Yet, tremendous educational efforts have been made to provide family planning for the poor. African American women account for about 12% of the population, but for about 32% of the abortions. According the Guttmacher Institute, "one in six U.S. women who received recent contraceptive or reproductive health care obtained these services at a publicly funded clinic."
You'd think that if more contraception were the answer, we'd have acheived a reduced illegitimacy rate by now.
posted by Dr J Roback Morse at 3:34 PM VOTE

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