LIFE WITH MOTHER
In Europe more women are having children out of wedlock and no one seems to care

IT'S midnight in smoky Karaoke bar in Copenhagen. Karina, 24, is belting out old Diana Ross tunes. A cook in a restaurant by day, Karina aspires to rock stardom by night. But lately she has another ambition : motherhood-a kind of Karaoke motherhood, as it were, with the lead performer going it alone.
"Whether there's a husband or not, I don't care", she says. Her boyfriend evaporated after she got pregnant three months ago, and she's regretting the abortion she had when he left. "Next time the opportunity comes up I'm gonna take it," she says, determination settling over her freckled face.
Maybe she should meet Kim, an 18-year-old from Jutland, sitting across the room. "Marriage is just a fairy tale," he says. "I just don't believe in it."
Does anyone in Europe believe in marriage any more? In Scandinavia, the generation that first eschewed the ritual is already having grand kids. The pages of Paris Match have long featured the out-of-wedlock off-spring of the Eurostars. But now, all over Europe, single motherhood is promising to change the demographic face of the continent.
Some of these single parents are teenagers who no longer feel that an unplanned pregnancy need be a mistake. A few are women who simply decide to raise a child alone. Most are mothers who may live with the father, at least for a while, but just don't see the point of marrying him.
In Sweden, more than half of all babies are born to unmarried parents; in France and England, it's about one in three. Virtually nobody gives up a baby for adoption anymore. In the modern European wedding, the bride and groom's own children are often the flower girls and ring bearers.
"The place of marriage in French society has changed altogether,"says Jean Claude Kaufmann of the National Center for Scientific Research. "Thirty years ago it was the beginning of a relationship. Today it's the culmination."
It's a social revolution that is confounding the old categories: what, exactly, is a family? In Denmark, "single" parents are so often cohabiting that the state statistical office has started counting them as married any way. In Ireland, where divorce will become possible only this year and abortion is still illegal, unmarried mothers are more common than married ones in some city neighbourhoods (low-income ones, mostly). All over Europe, in fact, single mothers are downright unremarkable. Much more controversial are single fathers, who are demanding to be treated equally in custody battles (box).
But may be people should be worried. Among some experts, there's a creeping fear that single motherhood can bring with it a host of social pathologies: poverty, drugs, low education and low employment. In the United States, out-of-wedlock births actually fell four per cent last year, for the first time in nearly 20 years, but in the ghetto four out of five children are still born to single mothers.
The American debate has echoes now in Britain. "Cohabiting families are usually among the poorest in Britain. "Cohabiting families are usually among the poorest in society," says Kathleen Liernan of the London School of Economics. "There seems to be a misperception afoot."
Still, the broad acceptance of single motherhood shows that sexual politics in Europe has changed for good in the last decade. Nowhere is that more clear than in Ireland, the country where the traditional balance of power between men and women has been most resistant to change. The Roman Catholic Church has lost much of its moral authority, and a vigorous women's movement has taken a high social profile. "A lot of women are deciding they don't need men in order to survive," says Noreen Byrne of the National Women's Council. Mary Robinson, the country's first woman president, represents a kind of symbolic encouragement of this independence.
It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment when the last shreds of stigma finally disappeared. but in France, perhaps it was the spring of 1996, when President Jacques Chirac publicly celebrated the birth of his grandson Martin. Chirac's daughter, Claude, refused at first even to name the father publicly, much less marry him.
In Britain, may be it was last year, when former rock star Bob Gledof, divorced with three children, told the tabloids of his sympathy for the plight of lone dads.
In Scandinavia marriage rates are climbing slightly but are still so low that cohabiting has become part of the national self-image. "Living together without being married is part of being Danish," explains Copenhagen psychologist Bodil Pedersen.
Tax breaks and welfare policies in many countries actually discourage people from marrying. Anja, a 20 something Berliner who recently bore twin boys, is living with the boys' father, a tax consultant. But if she married him, she'd lose an extra year's worth of child-care subsidies, at $400 a month.
Married women get benefits for only six months. In Copenhagen, not only do single mothers get additional cash, but underage single mothers get more still. The state pays Betina Johansen an extra $500 a month, plus the rent on her apartment, because she's under 18. She'd lose almost all those benefits if she married her boyfriend (who has three kids by previous girlfriends).
What's available for pregnant teenagers in Copenhagen would make an American social worker weep with envy. Johansen goes to a high school, where girls take a 24-week course in how to care for babies. They paint their distended bellies with fanciful patterns and hang photographs of themselves around the classroom, which is practically clean enough to eat off the floor.
After the child is born, they get more training in health and nutrition plus a choice of vocational programmes. They also learn about Danish welfare law, and what benefits they're entitled to.
Such liberal benefits do provoke jealousy among more traditional fellow citizens. There's a widespread conviction in Ireland that women have babies in order to jump the lime for public housing, for example.
Even the generous Danes envy the speed with which single parents get space in oversubscribed day-care centres. But when European societies get serious about cutting budgets, benefits to needy families are sacrosanct.
The political consensus for supporting single mothers is remarkably firm. Bu and large, European conservatives have morally accepted the notion of single motherhood. After years of falling birthrates, many right-wing politicians who might bemoan the decline of the family find themselves grateful that people are still having babies at all.
Says a doctor in a Paris maternity clinic: 'Every French baby is welcome."
In Germany, a negative birthrate has threatened for years to bankrupt the pension system, as an ever smaller cadre of young people is asked to support an ever larger cadre of old ones. For Germans, any kind of motherhood is politically unassailable.
Yet some politicians are beginning to worry. In Britain, single motherhood has become a political football. Back in 1992, Social Security Secretary Peter Lilley claimed he had "a little list of young ladies" who supposedly had gotten pregnant out of wedlock in order to collect more benefits from the state.
Last spring Lilley caused another uproar by proposing to dock benefits to single mothers who refused to give the fathers' names to the child support agency. Education Secretary Gillian Shephard now wants to implement a moral code for schools that puts more emphasis on "the value of the family as a bulwark of society".
But the conservatives are losing the issue to Labour Party leader Tony Blair, with his wife the three wholesome kids, who has explicitly made "family values" part of his public appeal. He's careful, however, not to stigmatise single parents, which he accuses the Tories of doing.
Blair has caught hold of a hot topic. With 70 per cent of all single mothers receiving some kind of public assistance, something frighteningly like the American underclass is beginning to develop in Britain's inner cities: stubborn pockets of drugs, poverty and hopelessness, with teenage moms who drop out of high school and never get a job. Kiernan of the London School of Economics says kids from single-parent families are more likely to leave school early, to become teenage parents themselves and to be unemployed."
Even in a rich country like Denmark, single parents are twice as likely as the rest of the population to be poor. Danes recoil with disdain at the suggestion that single motherhood can cause social problems; they consider it a highly "American" idea. Yet Vibeke Backmann, a social worker in Copenhagen, isn't sure Denmark can remain immune from the plagues of the American underclass.
"There are no traditional families today, and children from these broken families are not able to make stable relationships themselves," Backmann says. "This leads to crime and to drugs and to violence. Denmark is going to be more similar to the United States.
The link to unemployment is what already scares European policy makers. Single parents have a higher unemployment rate than married people and their unemployment rate has grown faster.
In Denmark in 1974, 11 per cent of single parents were unemployed: now the number is close to 30 per cent. The links between single parenthood and joblessness aren't entirely clear, though. When jobs are scarce, young girls may decide to have a baby because there isn't much else to do.
"For a middle-class woman who can aspire to travel and work, there's no reason to get pregnant", says Margot Dohery of Treoir, a clearing house for single parents in Dublin.
"For a lower-class woman, there's no reason not to get pregnant."
Europe's stagnant economies, with their high unemployment rates, are not generating the flexible jobs that many parents, but especially single parents, prefer.
"Work is very anti-family", says Doherty, voicing the views of young others. In some cases the state also discourages part-time employment. In Denmark, single parents lose their free rent and other social benefits if they find part-time employment. In Denmark, single parents lose their free rent and other social benefits if they find part-time work. Says Mogens Christofferson of Danish national Institute of Social Research: "Single mothers feel very isolated because they are unemployed".
Even without the overt social stigmas, single mothers complain of street. "Money is not the only thing women need", says Backman. 'They need friends, family; they need network."
Maybe that's why marriage rates have started edging up again in Denmark. "Our generation did away wit all the traditions and rituals," says Elisabeth Flensted-Jensen, 47, a Copenhagen single mother. "The next generation doesn't feel very close to the rituals but they are the only ones available."
But there's something very post-modern Dabish wedding. "What these young people want is the day, not the marriage, " says psychologist Ben Maries Sondergaard. "They want the dress and the carriage and the horses. It's a revival of romantic performance."
Every revolution has its counter revolution. In the 90s the idea of family is "in". Research by the Copenhagen institute for Future Studies shows that young people, even 15 and 16-year-olds, consider family to be the top priority in their lives and they expect it still to be so in 10 years' time. For them, says the institute's Maria Therese Hoppe, family "has nothing to do with economic support. It has to do with whom you cry to at the end of the day." For all the brave rhetoric about modern relationships, everyone still needs someone to hold the box of tissues.

CARROLL BIGERT