Cause for Alarm? Understanding Recent Trends in Teenage Childbearing

Teen pregnancy is back in the news. After 15 years of decline, the trend in teen birth rates ticked upward in 2006. Coupled with the ongoing media spotlight on the popular film Juno and the pregnancy of Britney Spears’ younger sister, we’re once again wringing our collective hands over kids having kids. But are these concerns really warranted? To what extent does teen pregnancy lead to mothers’ and children’s long-term poverty? Have policies adopted to deter early childbearing been effective in discouraging teens from having children before they are ready to shoulder the responsibilities of parenthood? To answer these questions, it’s necessary to put the issue in proper historical context, and to cast a sober eye on existing policies that were employed to keep rates of teenage childbearing low. Disciplines Family, Life Course, and Society | Gender and Sexuality | Sociology This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/sociology_papers/13 Teen pregnancy is back in the news. After 15 years of decline, the trend in teen birth rates ticked upward in 2006. Coupled with the ongoing media spotlight on the popular film Juno and the pregnancy of Britney Spears’ younger sister, we’re once again wringing our collective hands over kids having kids. But are these concerns really warranted? To what extent does teen pregnancy lead to mothers’ and children’s long-term poverty? Have policies adopted to deter early childbearing been effective in discouraging teens from having children before they are ready to shoulder the responsibilities of parenthood? To answer these questions, it’s necessary to put the issue in proper historical context, and to cast a sober eye on existing policies that were employed to keep rates of teenage childbearing low. Teenage childbearing first emerged as a public issue in the mid-1960s in the wake of the baby boom era. After the median marriage age for women dipped to 20 years in the late 1950s, the trend reversed, and Americans began marrying later and later. By 2006, the median age at marriage had risen to nearly 26 years. The rise in median age was occasioned in part by the decline of well-paying manufacturing and union jobs that undercut the time-honored practice of “shotgun weddings.” No longer were pregnant teens prepared to marry the fathers of their children when the men lacked good jobs or prospects of getting them in the immediate future. These weddings were partly responsible for the low median marriage age in the United States in the middle of the previous century. Today, shotgun weddings have become archaic; rather few teenage or even older couples now wed merely because of a premarital pregnancy. While early marriage became less practical and desirable, sexual activity during the teen years continued, and younger women in the 1960s and 1970s practiced contraception poorly (if at all). The inevitable result of the decline in teenage marriage was a rising proportion of out-of-wedlock births among teenagers, especially among low-income minorities, even Cause for Alarm? Understanding Recent Trends in Teenage Childbearing by Frank F. Furstenberg Trends Figure 1. Birthrates among Unmarried American Women by Race and Age, 1970 to 2004 Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2000); author’s compilation of national vital statistics data from 2000 to 2004. 160