Black couples cutting back dramatically on family size

In virtually every way - including the size of their family - John and Paula Lawrence are quintessentially middle class.

The Lawrences, who devote a lot of time and energy and love to their children, are adamant that they will have only two.In their decision to limit the size of their family, the Lawrences are an example of a little-noticed but striking trend in the nation's black population: a steep decline in the birthrate for married black couples. Married black women gave birth to 357,262 babies in 1970. But, by 1996, the last year for which complete figures were available, that figure had dropped to 179,568, a decline of nearly 50 percent, nearly twice the drop in the birthrate among married white women.

Most of the reasons for the sharp drop in child bearing among black women are universal - higher family incomes, more education, and movement away from parents and relatives who can provide support and child care. As more black families move up the economic ladder, they are following the well-worn path of other ethnic groups and reducing the size of their families.

The sharp drop in the birthrate for black married couples has, paradoxically, contributed to the appearance of what has been de-scrib-ed as a "crisis" of illegitimacy within the black population, where the percentage of births to mothers out of wedlock is approaching 70 percent.

Statisticians and demographers note that the startlingly high percentage of black children born outside marriage is not the result of more and more single black women giving birth. Indeed, the percentage of single black women who have given birth has been declining since 1989, and it reached a 40-year low in 1996.

Instead, the high proportion of black babies being born out of wedlock is now mainly a function of its statistical comparison to the steep drop in the number of children being born to married black women.