CHANGE: Married Women Are Having More Kids. Unmarried Women? Not So Much.

American women aren’t having children the way they did before the recession, but that obscures a little-noticed fact: Married women have staged a comeback.

New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that while America’s fertility rate slipped in 2013 to a record low, birth rates for married women are rising—even as rates for unmarried women continue to fall.

For every 1,000 unmarried U.S. women ages 15 to 44 in 2013, there were 44.3 births, down 2% from 2012 and 7% from 2010, CDC data show.

In contrast to unmarried women, birth rates for married women increased 1% in 2013 from 2012 to 86.9 births. In fact, they’re up 3% since 2010, after declining 5% between 2007 and 2010. (The absolute number of births among married women in 2013, 2.34 million, remained slightly below 2010’s 2.37 million.)

The divergence is “unprecedented over the last three decades,” says Sally Curtin, a demographer and statistician at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. “We’ve seen a rebound—but it’s just been in married women.”

Hmm. I guess that’s good, right?