Why Teen Pregnancy Is a Poverty Problem

National newspapers have been all over the teen pregnancy beat these past few weeks. First there was a study from the Guttmacher Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, that concluded the teen pregnancy rate is on the rise after more than a decade of decline. Then came a federally-funded report saying that the cure to the problem might just be those much-maligned abstinence-only sex education classes -- despite experts' opinions, offered in connection with the previous report, that those classes are the cause of the rise.

Deciphering teenagers' behavior is tricky business, so it's no wonder there are so many conflicting claims on the subject of teen pregnancy. But one fact is both indisputable and generally ignored by the mainstream press: teenage pregnancy is a poverty issue.

Although the Guttmacher report does not discuss the poverty factor in detail, the correlation is easy to see. The report's rankings of states by teen pregnancy rates looks eerily similar to the U.S. Census rankings of states by poverty rates. Mississippi, for example, has the nation's highest rate of poverty and the third highest rate of teen pregnancies. New Mexico is third in poverty and second in teen pregnancies. Texas leads in teen pregnancies and comes in ninth in the poverty rankings. Other "risk factors" for teenage pregnancy -- being a person of color, being disinterested in school, etc. -- similarly dovetail with living in poverty.

In addition, of course, when a child is born to a poor teenage mother, the child is much more likely to grow up in poverty herself and continue the cycle as an adult. According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, a child born to an unmarried teen mother has a 27 percent chance of growing up in poverty. If the mother has not earned a high school diploma or equivalency degree, the child will grow up in poverty 64 percent of the time. If those numbers are correct, the steep decline in teen pregnancy rates between 1991 and 2002 kept 460,000 children out of poverty.

Teen pregnancy is intrinsically a sensitive subject because of its relation to other tough topics like race, class and abortion, plus many people's reluctance to fully condemn a situation that brings a healthy child into the world (a child that the teenage mother may want very badly even if no one else thinks it's a good idea). But the fact that poverty leads to teenage pregnancy and teenage pregnancy leads to poverty is too troubling not to address.

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