Destinies of the Disadvantaged: The Politics of Teen Childbearing

4. Sexuality and Reproductive Health

Chapter 4 Sexuality and Reproductive Health IN THE EARLIER chapters of this book, I assembled evidence showing that teenage childbearing has never been quite the problem that most Americans believe it to be. For a host of reasons, the issue has assumed greater political importance and cultural significance than has ever been warranted by either demographic trends or the impact on young mothers and their offspring. Rather than being a primary source of social disadvantage, early childbearing is better understood as a product of disadvantage. As far as researchers have been able to demonstrate, its long-term impact on young mothers and their offspring is modest once we take full account of the selectivity. There are many good reasons for wanting to reduce teen childbearing, but based on existing evidence, its potential as a strategy for decreasing poverty or a means of curtailing the growth of female-headed households has surely been overestimated. Nonetheless, policymakers, generally believing otherwise, have designed a set of strategies to reduce the incidence of early childbearing as a means of disrupting the intergenerational cycle of poverty and economic dependency. Thus, teenage parenthood has provided the justification for a series of measures that proponents have claimed will reduce poverty. The logic of the argument goes something like this: (1) early childbearing produces a high rate of single-parent families; (2) children in single-parent families have more academic and social problems and are less likely to succeed in later life; therefore (3) reducing teenage childbearing is a powerful way of reducing poverty because it will both curtail out-of-wedlock unions and save the considerable costs associated with aiding lone-parent households . This argument became more attractive in the wake of the 73 retreat from marriage beginning in the 1960s, especially as out-ofwedlock childbearing replaced divorce as the major source of single parenthood. The effort to discourage, if not delegitimate, single parenthood, though almost universally endorsed in this country, has considerable appeal to conservatives, for whom the redistributive policies of the New Deal and Great Society were an anathema. Indeed, many critics of proto–welfare state programs and policies have argued with great success that such expenditures on single-parent families are a source of the problem rather than a solution because they ultimately backfire, creating incentives to have children outside of marriage (Blankenhorn 1990; Murray 1984; Wilson 2002). The next several chapters examine a set of diverse policies that emerged in response to rising rates of out-of-wedlock parenthood. Some of these policies, such as those considered in this chapter, are primarily aimed at youth; others are not exclusively so directed, but the population of adolescents and young adults who disproportionately have their first child out-of-wedlock are the major target groups for the marriage and welfare policies discussed in subsequent chapters. Many of those who believe that single parenthood is the primary culprit in generating high levels of poverty in the United States point to our conspicuously high rate of teenage parenthood as the engine that is driving young people to form families before they are prepared to assume the responsibilities of parenthood (Moynihan, Smeeding, and Rainwater 2004). It seems obvious to most policymakers that a major strategy for curtailing single parenthood involves pregnancy prevention among young adults, especially because so many early births are unplanned and unintended, a conclusion strongly supported by the findings reported in chapter 2. In addition, many scholars have concluded that when parents launch a fertility career disconnected from marriage, ultimately the children’s chances of succeeding in later life are damaged (Amato and Booth 1997; McLanahan and Sandefur 1994; Popenoe 1996). SEXUALITY AND PREGNANCY PREVENTION POLICIES In explaining the process of “unplanned parenthood,” it is necessary to account for a series of discrete events: initiating a sexual relationship , not using contraception effectively, conceiving, and bringing 74 Destinies of the Disadvantaged the pregnancy to term (electing not to abort and avoiding a miscarriage ). Over the past half-century, social demographers have investigated each of these events in some detail (Bongaarts 1978; Hofferth and Hayes 1987). Beyond academia, advocates and policymakers have used this information to devise various social strategies for reducing teen pregnancy and childbearing. This chapter explores the mismatch between what researchers have discovered and the kinds of public policies that have been crafted to reduce the level of teenage childbearing in the United States. I claim here that a huge gap exists...