Poverty, education and teenage girl births

A former Jesuit started this conversation and analysis by sending me a link to a December 31, 2022 New York Times article, noting the decline in teen birth rates. Unable to open the link, I responded:

So I have to ask, not because I distrust the Times to offer context, not because without reading the article I have to ask for the context I’d value. So….

How recent the decline? Two years? Ten? Sixteen? How long was the rate of increase before this reversal? Are we back to levels of 2002? or 1972? What about birth rates to single moms who are not teenagers? Is the abortion rate/count increasing (in this demographic)?

In turn, he sent me a copy and paste version that I skimmed, responded to and later accessed and converted to a PDF, here:

Their Mothers Were Teenagers. They Didn’t Want That for Themselves. - The New York Times.p

Download P • 10.58MB

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Teen births have fallen by 77 percent since 1991, and among young teens the decline is even greater, 85 percent, according to an analysis by Child Trends, a research group that studies children’s well-being. Births have fallen at roughly equal rates among teenagers who are white, Hispanic and Black, and they have fallen by more than half in every state.

The decline is accelerating: Teen births fell 20 percent in the 1990s, 28 percent in the 2000s and 55 percent in the 2010s. Three decades ago, a quarter of 15-year-old girls became mothers before turning 20, according to Child Trends estimates, including nearly half of those who were Black or Hispanic. Today, just 6 percent of 15-year-old girls become teen mothers.

And one more exceprt:

With teen births and child poverty falling in tandem, the chicken-egg question that follows, is which caused which?

It may seem intuitive that postponing motherhood helps teens escape poverty. But some researchers say the opposite dynamic drives change: Cutting child poverty reduces teen births. They cite studies that have found that most adolescents who become teen mothers are so disadvantaged their prospects would not improve even if they postponed childbirth.

The studies compared women who gave birth as teens with those from similar backgrounds who avoided teen birth (in some cases sisters), and found the groups fared similarly as adults.

“Research has shown that among those who grow up in disadvantaged circumstances teen childbearing has little independent effect on economic outcomes,” said Ms. Wildsmith, the Child Trends analyst.

Skeptics see limits in the data and note that the payoff to education is growing.

“I strongly disagree with the argument that teen births have no effect on social mobility,” said Isabel V. Sawhill of the Brookings Institution. “It’s a lot easier to move out of poverty if you’re not responsible for a child in your teenage years.”

The debate is more than academic. Some progressives worry that a narrow focus on preventing teen births will undermine broader anti-poverty plans and risks blaming adolescents for their poverty. Other see reducing poverty and teen births as complementary causes meant not to blame young women but empower them.

And here is my (lightly edited) response:

Introducing the poverty angle re-surfaces the chicken and egg debate. Focusing on immigrant stories clouds the story, as the primary demographic source of poverty is in single parent and immigrant households that were poor when their children were born and the births cause poverty to multiply and to reinforce the cycle. Apparently immigrants with a good work ethic, an education or a skill can break this cycle.

Considering global poverty, the leading causes are sex outside marriage in developed countries and sex within marriage in developing countries. Poverty is disproportionately concentrated among the youth of the world, just as death WITH Covid is disproportionately concentrated among the elderly. And that covers the world not just the USA or immigrants to the USA. So less sex, more opportunity, stronger marriages, and deferring children until after marriage work, along with better education and better hygiene (that reduces infant mortality). Infant mortality rate declines (from about 50% to less than 5% in the past two hunded years) in poor countries means that more children are surviving, simulataneously significantly increasing both life expectancy and poverty.