What these most recent trend pieces on unmarried motherhood have in common is that they fail to include any conversations with single parents about their lived experiences.

The simplest way to gain accurate perspective about unmarried mothering is to ask unmarried mothers. Beyond Baby Mamas, a new online support and advocacy initiative for single parents of color, focuses on facilitating this type of discourse. As its founder, I invite mothers to write personal essays and commentary about their families for our website and to engage in discussion via social media. Most importantly, we talk about our social, emotional, and financial needs and how they might best be met.

These ongoing conversations are far better at contextualizing unwed parenting statistics than once-a-year hypothesizing and hand-wringing.

A popular notion about unmarried mothers is that we make hasty decisions to have children with commitment-averse men. Conversations with mothers offer other stories. Single women are not soothsayers or mind-readers. And when circumstances change, attitudes often follow suit. The leaving type and the marrying type are not mutually exclusive. No one knows how well he will rise to the occasion of parenthood until he is in the daily trenches.

In an essay for BeyondBabyMamas.com, Damali Robertson, a grant-writer, anti-sexual violence advocate, and single mom of two, writes of her son's father:

It became apparent quickly that he intended to live his life much as he had before our son's birth—out all night, rarely home, resistant to daily diaper changes, feedings, and sleepless nights. Before I knew it, the relationship was on shaky ground. Things came to head one day, and he moved out.

Another of our writers, Nesha Finister, a divorced mother of two who works in the oil field sector, explains how, in her case, marrying before children didn't exempt her from family trouble:

I was married for seven years before the marriage failed and I filed for divorce. I felt that the marriage was so volatile that it would only produce unbalanced children. I did everything everyone else said to do to save the marriage, but in the end, we make great co-parents, and horrible mates.

In our most recent Twitter discussion, facilitated under the hashtag #whyimnotmarried, our followers weighed in. When asked if any participating women considered themselves, "single mothers by choice," one mother responded, "Yes. I chose to get impregnated by the wrong man who threatened to kill me if I terminated the pregnancy." Hers is not an isolated narrative.

According to the CDC, black women ages 25-29 are about 11 times more likely as white women in that age group to be murdered while pregnant or in the year after childbirth. The National Domestic Violence Hotline also reports that, of the 324,000 women who experience intimate partner violence while pregnant each year, 30 percent say the first incident occurs during pregnancy.