Per the article section below discussing the continuing downward spiral of teenage births I have to admit that I was stunned by this little factoid which is contrary to my expectation that the 80’s and 90’s would have had many more teenage births than the 50’s and 60’s. This expectation was based on the hue and cry in the media and elsewhere over the past two decades concerning the huge rise in out of wedlock teenage births.
Now I assume that most of these circa 1957 teenage mothers were married and that is where the distinction comes in (perhaps not). Does anyone have a site reference for marriage data across the last 50 years controlled for wedlock and out of wedlock births so I can investigate this unexpected factoid further.
*“U.S. teen births fall to record low Abstinence”
“Analysts have attributed the steady decline to a broad range of factors, including more awareness of HIV/AIDS, increased abstinence and the economic boom of the 1990s, which led many teens to put off starting families so they could take jobs. The nation’s highest teen birth rate was in 1957, roughly 96 births per 1,000."*
The Centers for Disease Control’s National Center for Health Statistics has a downloadable PDF file which includes birth rates classified by age group for 1999 and 2000, and includes percent of live births to unmarried mothers for the years 1990-2000, but it doesn’t show the intersection of those two groups and doesn’t appear to go back any farther than that.
A second PDF file details trends in pregnancy rates from 1976-1997. Again, it includes pregnancy rates for teen mothers and unmarried mothers, but not the intersection of those two groups. It does show the pregnancy rate for teens at about 72 per 1,000 in 1976, rising to just over 80 in 1990 and declining steadily since then. The birth rate for teen mothers is shown around 38 per 1,000 in 1976, climbing to a high of around 40 in 1992, and falling since then to around 30. It also shows the birth rate for all unmarried women of all ages and races to be around 44 per 1,000 in 1997.
If those numbers are to be believed, that is significantly lower than the 96 per 1,000 quoted in your reference. Sometimes, the conventional wisdom is not so wise. I suspect that that 96/1,000 number includes a lot of unmarried teens who were sent off to live with Aunt Fannie for the school year and came back a few pounds heavier.
First, you should realize that the '50’s were not like Happy Days. There were lots of unmarried teenagers having sex. When the girl got pregnant, the families would insist that the couple get married immediately. Even among the teens who waited till marriage, there were a lot more marriages just out of high school (or even before graduating from high school, since dropping out was much more common). In other cases, as pldennison indicated, the girl was shipped off to live with a relative or a home for unwed mothers and the baby was adopted. (Are there any homes for unwed mothers anymore?) There were even still cases with, say, a 16-year-old girl whose own mother was only 38 in which after the birth things would be jiggered so as to make it look like the grandmother was the mother. Furthermore, a lot more teenagers are using birth control now than did so in 1957. Also, it appears that during the '90’s there has been an increase in abstinence among teenagers.
Also, in 1957 abortion was illegal in the US, and many more teenage girls seek abortion now. I have no idea how many teenage pregnancies are aborted, but I’m sure it has an impact on these statistics.
It appears as though the numbers mentioned above by pldennison do reflect that, by distinguishing between pregnancies and births…
So even without considering the abortion factor, and using the 1990 pregnancy numbers from above of just over 80 girls per thousand, that’s still a rather significant drop in teenagers who even get pregnant in the first place.
Perhaps the answer lies more in a combination of the increased availability and effectiveness of birth control and more teens choosing abstinence.
Indeed! I recently had a “maiden” great aunt, let’s call her Polly, die at an advanced age. She left a much younger “adopted sister”, June, who never married. Polly and June lived together until Polly died. When Polly died, June was the only sibling left alive.
You can see where this story is headed. At Polly’s funeral, June revealed that she was actually Polly’s biological daughter, not her sister. Polly’s parents adopted June when she was born, so P and J were biologically mother and daughter but legally sisters.
This happened back in the 1920s. Polly had several other siblings who would have been old enough at that time to have known the real story, but none of them ever let on the truth, not even on their deathbeds, so none of the descendants knew P and J were really sisters. When June told everyone the truth, I understand it was quite a scene - there were several 60-70 year old relatives who had gone their whole lives thinking that P and J were sisters.
So this sort of thing really did happen, even in the early 1900s.
My mother gave birth in 1957 at the age of 17. She was not married at the time of conception (they were in high school) but was married by the time my oldest brother was born. Additionally, the year I graduated from high school (early eighties) we had a conversation in which I noted that I knew of five or six girls (in a class of more than 700) who had become pregnant that year. She commented that her entire school was less than 700 students and she felt certain that no fewer than two dozen girls had become pregnant during her junior and senior years. I can’t provide cites (other than the brothers birth certificate and his parents marriage license), but it sure seems to fit with my mothers world view. Her observation was that teen sex was more likely to result in pregnacy and “teen marriage” in the 50’s because sex and it’s consequences weren’t discussed (at least not in her world).