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Essay on Teen Pregnancy
Many of the provisions of the 1996 law overhauling the nation’s welfare system will expire at the end of the current fiscal year on September 30. The reauthorization process likely will set the stage for a major debate over one of the law’s main stated goals, reducing out-of-wedlock births, and how best to achieve it. Social conservatives favor programs and policies encouraging marriage and promoting abstinence from sexual intercourse outside of marriage for people of all ages. Others suggest that it would be more appropriate and more effective for policymakers to concentrate on finding ways to sustain recent declines in teenage pregnancy and childbearing, since half of first non-marital births are to teens and almost eight in 10 teen pregnancies are unintended.
The declines in recent years in teen pregnancy rates and birthrates are impressive: Both now stand at record low levels. However, the United States still lags far behind other developed countries, whose rates have fallen to much lower levels. New research suggests that going forward, more realistic views of young people’s sexuality and their needs as they make the transition to adulthood, along with more-comprehensive approaches to meeting those needs, may be in order.
Key Trends over Time
Childbearing The rate of teen childbearing in the United States has fallen steeply since the late 1950s, from an all time high of 96 births per 1,000 women aged 15–19 in 1957 to an all time low of 49 in 2000. Birthrates fell steadily throughout the 1960s and 1970s; they were fairly steady in the early 1980s and then rose sharply between 1988 and 1991 before declining throughout the 1990s. In recent years, this downward trend has occurred among teens of all ages and races.Unmarried childbearing. Even though teen childbearing overall has declined steeply over the last half-century, the proportion of all teen births that are nonmarital has increased equally dramatically......
