# Tings Were Better In the Fifties, Vol. I: Teen Pregnancy (the SA debate series) **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 2, 2009, 12:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996 "2009-11-02T00:05:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 12:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/1 "2009-11-02T00:05:02Z")
I am going to try to explore several propositions that **Starving Artist** is known for. This effort was largely inspired by a recent Pit thread. However, we’re in GD here, and I see no reason the subjects cannot be explored by GD methods. The first in our series of SA-inspired lecturs, then, will be Teen Pregnancy in the Fifties. I come into this with no research, but a strong conviction that unwed pregnancy, especially among teenagers, is much higher now than it was during the 1950s. I grant that overall teen pregnancy may have been higher then, but it seem to me the gravamen of this complaint refers to unwed pregnancy. So - I’ll start this topic off with that assertion: that the number of out-of-wedlock pregnancies among teenagers was much lower during the 1950s in the United States than it is today. Am I right? ---
**Author:** ![Superfluous\_Parentheses](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8edcca/32.png) [@Superfluous\_Parentheses](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Superfluous_Parentheses)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 12:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/2 "2009-11-02T00:10:40Z")
Why is this about unwed pregnancies? Who cares about that? The question should be about unwanted pregnancies, or possibly just teenage pregnancies in general. ---
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/3 "2009-11-02T00:14:06Z")
> [@Superfluous\_Parentheses](#): > > Why is this about unwed pregnancies? Who cares about that? The question should be about unwanted pregnancies, or possibly just teenage pregnancies in general. Here is my rationale for that distinction: an unwed pregnancy often means that the child will be raised by a single parent. In my view, it’s better for a child to be raised by two parents than by one. In any event, that’s the question I’m poising. If you’re saying you agree that my claim is true but that it doesn’t mean the Fifties were better because of it, then I guess that’s a valid line of discussion. But I think there’s some value in first confirming that the claim itself is true. ---
**Author:** ![Hamlet](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hamlet/32/2818_2.png) [@Hamlet](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hamlet)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/4 "2009-11-02T00:14:56Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > I am going to try to explore several propositions that **Starving Artist** is known for. For the love of God, why? ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/5 "2009-11-02T00:15:06Z")
The ting about unwed, teen pregnancies is the correlation with poverty. ---
**Author:** ![Superfluous\_Parentheses](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8edcca/32.png) [@Superfluous\_Parentheses](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Superfluous_Parentheses)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 12:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/6 "2009-11-02T00:20:24Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > Here is my rationale for that distinction: an unwed pregnancy often means that the child will be raised by a single parent. In my view, it’s better for a child to be raised by two parents than by one. There are plenty of couples with kids that aren’t married. Probably many more now than in the 50s - when the choice was pretty much “mother leaves town in disgrace” or “shotgun wedding”. So the numbers just aren’t comparable. > [@](#): > > In any event, that’s the question I’m poising. If you’re saying you agree that my claim is true but that it doesn’t mean the Fifties were better because of it, then I guess that’s a valid line of discussion. But I think there’s some value in first confirming that the claim itself is true. I just think the question as it stands is going to give a misleading result. Unless you want to count currently unmarried couples with kids as married. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 12:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/7 "2009-11-02T00:31:12Z")
Are we talking unwed pregnancies or unwed births? Because I’m betting that access to abortions will have decreased the latter significantly. ---
**Author:** ![Superfluous\_Parentheses](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8edcca/32.png) [@Superfluous\_Parentheses](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Superfluous_Parentheses)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 12:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/8 "2009-11-02T00:44:17Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Are we talking unwed pregnancies or unwed births? Because I’m betting that access to abortions will have decreased the latter significantly. Also: nine months is quite enough to arrange a marriage. ---
**Author:** ![wonky](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wonky/32/393_2.png) [@wonky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wonky)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 12:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/9 "2009-11-02T00:45:48Z")
We get good tings now, too! Don’t disparage modern tings! Anyway, teen pregnancies were higher in the 50s. Some of those teens were certainly married (which I consider a negative in itself). I posted some stats about this very thing a while back, so I’m off to find 'em. ETA: I said “teen pregnancies.” I should have said “teen birth rates.” Important distinction that I shouldn’t have muddled. ---
**Author:** ![Simplicio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c37758/32.png) [@Simplicio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Simplicio)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 12:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/10 "2009-11-02T00:47:41Z")
The rate of unwed births to girls 15-19 was around 18% in the 50’s as compared to ~75% in the 90’s. pdf (table 2). A large chunk of the difference appears to be, as **Superfleuous** suggests, un-married woman being more likely get married after a child is conceived in the 50’s as compared to now. ---
**Author:** ![wonky](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wonky/32/393_2.png) [@wonky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wonky)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 12:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/11 "2009-11-02T00:50:37Z")
> [@](#): > > 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 (see chart below). 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, from 13% in 1950 to 79% in 2000 (see chart). Two factors are at play. The first is that marriage in the teen years, which was not uncommon in the 1950s, has by now become quite rare. (By the mid-1990s, the typical age of first marriage in the United States had risen to just over 25 for women and 27 for men.) The second is that this trend has extended to pregnant teens as well: In contrast to the days of the “shotgun marriage,” very few teens who become pregnant nowadays marry before their baby is born. > > Abortion. Birthrates rise and fall as a result of changes in the rate at which women become pregnant or resolve their pregnancies in abortion, or a combination of both. Among teens in the United States, at least in recent years, declining birthrates are not the result of more pregnant teens opting to have an abortion. The U.S. teen abortion rate, after rising through the 1970s and holding fairly constant during the 1980s, then began a steady decline. By 1997, the rate was 28 abortions per 1,000 women 15-19—33% lower than the rate a decade earlier. From [here](http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/tgr/05/1/gr050107.html). ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 12:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/12 "2009-11-02T00:58:40Z")
I was just tinking, surely girls in the fifties were expected to attend college in far lower numbers. It didn’t matter if they were pregnant (and shotgun-married) at 17, since their formal education and long-term job opportunities were pretty much nil, anyway. A modern 17 year-old has a much better idea of what she’d give up if she kept her unexpected baby. ---
**Author:** ![Superfluous\_Parentheses](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/8edcca/32.png) [@Superfluous\_Parentheses](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Superfluous_Parentheses)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 12:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/13 "2009-11-02T00:59:59Z")
> [@Simplicio](#): > > The rate of unwed births to girls 15-19 was around 18% in the 50’s as compared to ~75% in the 90’s. pdf (table 2). A large chunk of the difference appears to be, as **Superfleuous** suggests, un-married woman being more likely get married after a child is conceived in the 50’s as compared to now. Note that those are percentages of the total of births for the age group. And yes, according to that data, in the 50s almost **50%** of those women married after they got pregnant and before they conceived. I will also note that the absolute number of births for those ages are only up by a little bit: about 1,600,000 (about 1% of the total population) in the 50s, and 1,870,000 (about 0.7%) in the early 90s. I’m not sure about the number of teenagers during those times, so my given percentages will probably not give a good indication. ---
**Author:** ![F.U.Shakespeare](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/aca169/32.png) [@F.U.Shakespeare](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/F.U.Shakespeare)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 1:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/14 "2009-11-02T01:04:05Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > The ting about unwed, teen pregnancies is the correlation with poverty. And the likelihood that an unskilled but able-bodied seventeen year old American boy could find a job that would support three people was, I would think, higher in the 1950s than today. ---
**Author:** ![lissener](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lissener/32/6139_2.png) [@lissener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lissener)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 1:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/15 "2009-11-02T01:28:22Z")
This should proceed in a logical fashion: First confirm the numbers: number of births, ages of girls. THEN get into a debate over such words as “unwed” and “unwanted.” Otherwise, the higher rate of birthrate, but lower rate of \*unwed \*birthrate, could reasonably be taken to say more about marriage than about pregnancy. In other words, it’s certainly possible that girls were finding themselves unexpectedly pregnant at similar–or even higher–rates in the fifties than today. (Fewer options for birth control; less sex education, etc…) But if marriage was seen, culturally, as an “easy fix,” then suddenly by appending the word “unwed” to your criteria you eliminate a good many pregnancies from your statistics, even though they very likely began in similar circumstances. ---
**Author:** ![lissener](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lissener/32/6139_2.png) [@lissener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lissener)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 1:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/16 "2009-11-02T01:33:34Z")
In other words, and in the intended context of the OP, the point that SA is always trying to make when he brings this kind of thing up, is that due to the Summer of Love, girls today are looser, and are taught in school to throw their legs in the air at the drop of a hat. When in fact it’s quite possible that teenagers have always been horny, since the dawn of time, but fewer kids are getting \*married \*today. Two distinct issues. Anyway, my take on why “unwed” muddies things. Sorry, _tings_. ---
**Author:** ![Dorothea\_Book](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/da6949/32.png) [@Dorothea\_Book](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dorothea_Book)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 1:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/17 "2009-11-02T01:36:58Z")
> [@lissener](#): > > This should proceed in a logical fashion: > > First confirm the numbers: number of births, ages of girls. > > THEN get into a debate over such words as “unwed” and “unwanted.” And maybe THEN debate what’s _better_? ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 1:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/18 "2009-11-02T01:43:04Z")
> [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > I was just tinking, surely girls in the fifties were expected to attend college in far lower numbers. It didn’t matter if they were pregnant (and shotgun-married) at 17, since their formal education and long-term job opportunities were pretty much nil, anyway. A modern 17 year-old has a much better idea of what she’d give up if she kept her unexpected baby. It did matter if they got pregnant, since that meant they dropped out of college. My mother mentioned that happened to a lot of her fellow women in college; they got pregnant and had to drop out. Ancedote included since **SA** is always going on about he was there and knows what it was like. ---
**Author:** ![Simplicio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c37758/32.png) [@Simplicio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Simplicio)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 1:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/19 "2009-11-02T01:51:36Z")
> [@Superfluous\_Parentheses](#): > > I will also note that the absolute number of births for those ages are only up by a little bit: about 1,600,000 (about 1% of the total population) in the 50s, and 1,870,000 (about 0.7%) in the early 90s. I’m not sure about the number of teenagers during those times, so my given percentages will probably not give a good indication. The first bit of **jsgoddess’s** cite addressed this, the rate of teen pregnancy has almost halved between 1957 and 2000. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 1:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/20 "2009-11-02T01:53:01Z")
It seems to me that if you accept the premise that single motherhood is a negative then it follows that Roe v Wade was a clear improvement of American culture - it obviously prevented a large number of single women from giving birth. If you feel that Roe v Wade was bad for American culture, then I guess your argument is that children are a net positive for our country, regardless of their mothers’ marital status. And that leads to the conclusion that an increase in teenage pregnancies represents an improvement over life in the fifties. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996.md?page=2)