According to an article in the NY Times yesterday life expectancy is still rising slowly in the US. But they talked about certain subgroups. The staggering one is that among white women without a HS diploma, life expectancy has dropped–yes dropped–by five years since 1990! And in fact, black women without HS diploma have caught up with and even just passed those white women. There was some speculation in the article, but no smoking gun (although increased smoking seems to be one cause). Overall, women still live longer than men and–surprising to me–Hispanics outlive whites. But it is that loss of five years that just blows my mind.
This is why it’s important to stay in school, kids!
Maybe it has something to do with teenage girls getting knocked up and dropping out to raise a child?
If it is any consolation, all the white women I know without a high school diploma may die young but they have a hell of wild time while they are here. Trailer parks pack a lifetime of memories and excitement into just a few short years. Who is really being shortchanged here? It isn’t like they don’t live to see their grandkids. That is usually done before they hit 40. My childhood best friend and his wife are on track to be great-grandparents when they are barely 50 if not sooner.
I’d speculate that the drop in life expectancy among lower-educated whites has something to do with higher rates of obesity and smoking among the poor.
Teen pregnancy hasn’t been going up the way that obesity has soared over the last couple of decades.
This sounds plausible to me, too.
Also, awesome name/post combo for OP. 
I think you nailed with the smoking issue-the big growth market (domestically) for cigarettes has been teenage girls-since the 1970’s. Lots of those poor women are now succumbing to lung cancer and emphysema. So sad.
I’d speculate that maybe people are just getting more education, so the class “White women without a HS diploma” has been getting smaller, with only the slowest of the slow, who already had a life expectancy below the group average remaining in it, while the marginally more successful now get the diploma when they wouldn’t previously.
Maybe, but did the HS dropout rate decline in the era when these women dropped out. It is the comparison with their black counterparts that also caught my eye. Do they not smoke as much? Are their teenage pregnancy rates lower? Are they less obese? I don’t know the answer to those questions, but whatever it is, it didn’t affect men. Men’s life expectancy went up over that 18 year period, both of blacks and whites although the blacks remained a few years behind the whites. And five years! That is an astonishing quantity.