MYTHICAL MURPHY BROWN

THE MYTHICAL MURPHY BROWN -- the highly paid professional woman who chooses to have a child out of wedlock -- is back, courtesy of the U. S. Census Bureau. On November 8, the bureau released a Current Population Report entitled "Fertility of American Women" by Amara Bachu, which purported to have located the long-sought Brown. Here's how some of our nation's leading newspapers handled the discovery:

The San Francisco Examiner headline screamed, "Single Motherhood Going Upscale."

The lead to the Austin American Statesman story proclaimed, "The unmarried mother in America is increasingly a 30-something college graduate with a professional job."

The Arizona Republic reported, "Move over pregnant teenagers of America. The Murphy Browns are coming up from behind. That's right, the unmarried mother in America is slowly shifting profiles: In the past decade, she is increasingly a 30-something college grad with a professional job, says Amara Bachu, author of the Census Study."

The headline in the Houston Chronicle announced, "Single motherhood rising steeply . . . The Big Surprise: It's Mostly Older Women, Not Teen- agers."

The reification of Murphy Brown was taking place, and the report's author, Amara Bachu, was driving the story. Bachu told the Houston Chronicle: "We have seen the changes, especially among white women. . . . Their rates have almost doubled since 1982." She told the Associated Press, "Most of these women are economically independent. They are also older, their biological clock is ticking off, so they cannot wait to find a suitable man."

While other newsworthy data from the report, such as fertility rates for immigrants, made it into some stories (Bachu stressed them to me on the phone) , the Murphy Brown angle clearly won the day. But was there actually evidence in the report that Murphy Browns are eclipsing teenage mothers? To find out, it is instrucLive to compare the points emphasized in the text with the data in the tables.

Lately, the Census Bureau has dropped the five- to ten-page discussion that used to accompany the release of new data, preferring a lwo-page "highlight" setting out patterns and trends as bullet points. After the release of Bachu's report, the media homed in on one bullet in particular, prominently featured in both the report and the press release: "About 7 percent of never- married teenagers had borne a child, while among women in their thirties, about 4 out of every 10 had borne a child out of wedlock."

For those who haven't read How to Lie with Statistics, let's deconstruct this statement, which appears at first glance to imply that an astounding preponderance of unwed mothers are out of the Murphy Brown mold.

In fact, it contains a flagrant sleight of hand. The final clause should read: about 4 out of every 10 never-married women in their thirties had borne a child out of wedlock at some point in their lives. Thus, the sentence does not compare the reproductive behavior of teens with that of single women in their thirties. The 4 out of 10 include women in their thirties who had babies back in their teens and twenties as well as their thirties but never tied the knot.

And there is another source of confusion. Think about it. How many girls 15 to 19 are married? Very few. How many women in their 30s are or have been married? Most. While 96 percent of teenagers have never been married, only 17 percent of women in their 30s have never been married. The groups being compared are of wildly unequal size; it is hard to relate 7 percent of a very large group to 40 percent of a quite small one.

In fact, other figures in the Census report are much more revealing -- and corrosive of the Murphy Brown myth.

From July 1993 to June 1994, 72 percent of all teenage births were to unmarried women, while only 11 percent of births to women between 30 and 44 were illegitimate. Furthermore, the increase in births to unmarried women between Bachu's base year, July 1989-June 1990, and 1993-94 was higher for teens (7 percent) than for women ages 30-44 (4 percent).

Or compare the two groups' contributions to the pool of illegitimate children. In 1993-94, girls ages 15-19 accounted for 29 percent of all births to unmarried women; if women ages 20-24 are included, the combined group accounted for two out of three babies born out of wedlock. By contrast, the group from which our blissful, self-fulfilled, independent Murphy Browns come, the 30-44 age bracket, accounts for 17 percent of all out-of-wedlock births.

The ice on which the mythical Murphy Brown skates gets even thinner. The TV character is college-educated and a professional. Factoring educational achievement into the analysis shows that a mere 4.7 percent of all illegitimate births in 1993-94 were to women with a bachelor's degree. This, by the way, was slightly lower than in Bachu's base year. Only 6 percent of all illegitimate births were to professionals in 1993-94. While this is up from 4 percent in 1989-90 (a whopping increase from the statistician's point of view), the phenomenon remains very limited. Yes, more single professionals are having children -- but still very few of them are, and they still make up a paltry share of all unmarried others.

Meanwhile, the important points about the educational and employment status of unmarried women who gave birth in 1993-94-none of which made the Census press release -- are grim: More than one-third hadn't graduated from high school. Three-quarters had not attended college. And nearly two-thirds were jobless. Finally, there is the matter of the children's welfare. Here, the telling comparisons are between children born to unmarried and to married parents.

Consider education: While more than one-third of children born out of wedlcck have mothers who haven't graduated from high school, fewer than one- sixth of children born inside marriage had parents without a high-school diploma. As for the ballyhooed college-graduate single mother, fewer than 5 percent of children born out of wedlock are lucky enough to have her. By contrast, 25 percent of children born to a married couple have the benefit of a mother with a bachelor's degree.

The differences in the economic status of children inside and outside marriage are staggering. In 1992, nearly half of families headed by a single mother lived in poverty, but only one out of 14 married-couple families was below the poverty line. While 25 percent of children grow up in single-parent families, these children constitute 60 percent of those who are poor.

Almost four years after then-vice president Dan Quayle's famous speech citing Murphy Brown as a deplorable sign of the times, it is beyond dispute that the breakdown of the family exacerbates nearly every social pathology from which America suffers. A host of luminaries, from conservatives George Gilder and Charles Murray to liberals Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, has pinned rising rates of welfare, crime, drug addiction, and educational failure on the proliferation of single-parent households.

Regrettably, this bipartisan consensus has never been accepted in faculty lounges and journalistic haunts, where 1960s relativism continues to thrive. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, academics and journalists still search for the exceptions -- successful cases of never- married parents -- and use them to argue that single-parenting is just another perfectly viable lifestyle choice. Bachu planted her study in this fertile ground -- which is why it is necessary that the study be debunked, before it dribbles unchallenged into more news stories and columns and is cited in college classrooms across America.

Quayle and the otherare right, of course -- our unprecedented rates of illegitimacy are harming society. And they are still on the rise, in almost all ethnic groups. Family breakdowris not a racial problem, it is an American problem, and public resources ought not be used, by the Census Bureau or anyone else, to create a fantasyland. The production of fictions like Murphy Brown belongs properly in Hollywood.

Michael Lynch is a public policy fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, a think tank in San Francisco.