EMILY YOFFE: Forget Juno. Out-of-wedlock births are a national catastrophe. I blame Ingrid Bergman.

UPDATE: Reader Christian Southwick emails:

Regarding your Emily Yoffe/Out-of-Wedlock Births post, did you mean Candice Bergen (of Murphy Brown fame) rather than Ingrid Bergman?

I’m not being a smartass, I’m seriously asking . . . is there some Bergman cultural reference that I am unaware of?

Why yes, yes there is. Ingrid Bergman became pregnant by Roberto Rossellini in 1949 and bore his child out of wedlock in 1950. (See this Wikipedia entry for a summary). Her career was more or less ruined in America for many years as a result. This was all long before I was born, but my sense is that despite the backlash, in retrospect this is the point at which attitudes toward out-of-wedlock motherhood began to shift.