# 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:** 3
**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, 5:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/41 "2009-11-02T05:43:05Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > But for the nonce, I think there would be value in at least agreeing on those statistics. We can then proceed to arguing over what they mean. I don’t think you’ll get a meaningful statistic on teen-pregnancies terminated via abortion, simply because in the 50’s it was both illegal and taboo, and so any attempt to try and derive statistics on abortion in that period is probably little better then a shot in the dark, and even today its probably inexact. But if you’ll be satisfied with teen pregnancies that lead to a birth, then we’ve already answered the question. The rate of teen pregnancy has about halved since 1957, while the proportion of teen woman who are unmarried at the time of conception is about 90% vs 40% in 1955-1959. So assuming my algebra is correct (its late here), I think you’ll see that the two rates for total unwed teen pregnancy are within a few points of each other. A larger chunk of teens who get pregnant remain unmarried, but they become pregnant at a much lower rate. ---
**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, 6:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/42 "2009-11-02T06:09:27Z")
I just got home and I realized I have a pdf here that might be interesting because I think it addresses some of the issues brought up BUT! I haven’t had a chance to look it over and I’m going to fall asleep before I can. So if anyone wants to [look this over](http://www.census.gov/prod/99pubs/p23-197.pdf), please do. ---
**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, 7:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/43 "2009-11-02T07:41:28Z")
> [@](#): > > Stop arguing here, because you’re either deliberately trying to derail this or you have a truly astonishingly thin grasp on analysis. Excluded middle means that it’s possible for a pregnancy to be bad but abortion to be worse, just as double parking is bad, but applying the death penalty to the offense is worse. I’d say it’s your analysis which is weakly grasped. Your double parking analogy doesn’t work. The driver started out alive - killing him is a change in status. But the woman started out non-pregnant. By your definition, her becoming pregnant was a problem. But now you’re saying that her going back to being non-pregnant is also a problem. To apply your analogy, you’re saying that double parking is wrong - but under no circumstances should we move the car to a legal parking space. The only defense for the pro-life position that abortion is always wrong is the claim that every pregnancy is a good thing and none should be terminated. But if every pregnancy is a good thing how can becoming pregnant be a problem as you claimed? ---
**Author:** ![Starving\_Artist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/aeb1de/32.png) [@Starving\_Artist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Starving_Artist)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 7:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/44 "2009-11-02T07:59:33Z")
Your position seems to be that abortion isn’t a problem so teen pregnancy isn’t a problem. But abortion is not a good thing. It’s costly for the kids and their families who have to come up with the money to pay for it; it creates stress, tension and unhappiness between pregnant teens and their parents and sometimes even between the parents themselves. It’s traumatizing for many if not most young girls to have to go through. And many girls who get abortions suffer doubt, regret and guilt, often lasting to one degree or another for many years afterward, if not for the rest of their lives. So the abortion solution is not a throw-away. (Nor is it the subject of the OP, which is teen pregnancy, and not how it gets ended.) ---
**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, 8:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/45 "2009-11-02T08:03:00Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > Don’t accuse other posters of lying in Great Debates. > OTOH, **Lissener** and **Der Trihs** , you are out of line creating alleged paraphrases of **Starving Artist** ’s positions at a point where he had not even posted to the thread or in regards to points that he had not actually raised. If you need to take cheap shots, go back to the Pit thread to do it. > > [/Moderating] Whatever. The point I might’ve made more innocuously is that SA gives the impression that his objections are moral, not political or practical in nature. ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 9:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/46 "2009-11-02T09:06:08Z")
Some digging in newspaper databases has revealed some stories that add a bit of detail to the figures given by **jsgoddess** in her post, above. While these newspaper articles do not, and cannot, answer the comparative question regarding teenage pregnancy and births in the 1950s compared to the present, they do give a sense of the scale of the problem back then, and how it was perceived by contemporaries. I’ve placed in quotes some of the interesting sections from each story. Click on the titles to read the full (PDF) articles. [“District Seen Facing ‘Moral Catastrophe’ in Child Illegitimacy,” _Washington Post and Times Herald_, June 21, 1957.](https://jshare.johnshopkins.edu:443/mhender4/public_html/gen_images/50s1.pdf) > [@](#): > > …the report is based on detailed records of children from 13 of the city’s 23 junior high schools. > > \ > > In a number of instances, children have “made an effort to become pregnant to stop school.” If the pregnancy occurs in the 13th or 14th year and they are forced to return to school a number of these children have sought to get pregnant again. > > \ > > Dr. Pate cited another case in which a woman receiving welfare funds has seven illegitimate children and now her 12-year-old daughter is pregnant. > > Illegitimacy statistics, Dr. Pate said, fall far short of the actual number because many cases are not reported. > > But the dramatic increase, he said, can be shown by the fact that only seven illegitimate pregnancies among junior high school students came to the attention of the Southwest Health Center in 1948-49 while 82 were recorded among 13 to 17-year-olds in 1956-57. [“Illegitimacy Rise Alarms Agencies: Aid vs. Punishment Debate Flares as the Rate Jumps Among Teen-Agers,” _New York Times_, August 9, 1959.](https://jshare.johnshopkins.edu:443/mhender4/public_html/gen_images/50s2.pdf) > [@](#): > > Mrs. Oettinger says nearly 5,000 illegitimate babies are born each year to girls under 15 years of age. Some have even confessed that they deliberately became pregnant so they could leave school. > > \ > > Far and away the most controversial of all the factors blamed for the upswing in illegitimacy is the growing custom of boys and girls, still in their early teens, to go steady. > > \ > > Disturbed over the sharp rise in teen-age pregnancies in Washington, D.C., education authorities have launched a pioneer program of sex education in elementary schools. > > Youngsters 11 and 12, with the consent of their parents, were shown films of the reproductive process. The education program’s effectiveness has yet to be measured. [“Problem of the Unwed Mother: Our Illegitimate Rate Is at an All-time High,” _Chicago Daily Tribune_, November 1, 1959.](https://jshare.johnshopkins.edu:443/mhender4/public_html/gen_images/50s3.pdf) > [@](#): > > In the last 10 years there has been a 400 per cent increase in unwed mothers between the ages of 15 and 17. If the present rate continues, it is predicted that by 1962, between 110,000 and 120,000 babies will have been born out of wedlock to teenage girls. > > In Chicago, where nearly 9,000 illegitimate babies were born last year, teen-agers account for 25 per cent of the total number of unwed mothers. About 60 per cent are non-whites. Board of Education figures show between 400 and 500 quit school each year because of pregnancy. A few have even confessed they deliberately become pregnant so they could quit school. > > \ > > Her answer capsules what sociologists mean when they say: “Former patterns of sex behavior seem to be changing. The double standard is dissolving. Women are playing a more aggressive sex role and emerging as a new concept of womanhood in American culture.” > > The “new concept” has set off a storm of controversy. On the one hand are the public officials who deplore ebbing standards of morality and the resulting burden on United States taxpayers; some are even proposing various methods of punishment to stem the tide. On the other are the sociologists who contend that unwed parenthood is here to stay and we might as well face it realistically. > > \ > > No other country in the world so stimulates and encourages sex while at the same time condemning it. > > \ > > Tho usually lumped together clinically as a kind of sociological freak, the “unwed mother” actually falls into two sharply delineated categories: the promiscuous woman with 8 or 10 illegitimate children all collecting ADC funds, and the new good-bad girl—far more typical—who has her baby in secrecy, at no expense to the public, gives it out for adoption, either privately or thru and agency, and returns to her self-supporting or family supported role in society. [“New American Tragedy: Schoolgirl Mothers,” _Baltimore Sun_, June 8, 1958.](https://jshare.johnshopkins.edu:443/mhender4/public_html/gen_images/50s4.pdf) > [@](#): > > A persistent rise in illegitimate births, year after year, has been recorded by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Among girls 15 or younger, there has been a nationwide increase on 30 percent since 1949. > > \ > > In New York last November, 1,250 pregnant unwed girls 15 or younger were dismissed from public schools during the first two months of the school year. In Baltimore, half of the illegitimate births are among teen-agers. > > \ > > At the Salvation Army’s 34 [maternity] homes, more than half the girls are adolescents. > > \ > > The growing overemphasis on “sex glamour” quite likely has been a factor in the trend. Also, the new freedom of sex information has sometimes been mishandled. I believe that sex knowledge, given honestly, naturally, and wholesomely, is helpful in the development of most youngsters. But some children have been exposed to knowledge they simply weren’t ready for. > > \ > > It is impossible for anyone to say what proportion of the increase can be attributed solely to the custom of “going steady”…Having a steady is a symbol of a girl’s social status. It is proof to her that she is good-looking and “popular.” > > \ > > The problem of unwed mothers is one which simply can’t be solved. Even the old-fashioned remedy of a “shotgun wedding” is usually the wrong one, since studies show that teen-age marriages, especially when there are children, are very prone to failure. > > \ > > But don’t assume that every teen-ager is a potential delinquent. After all, out of close to 8,000,000 teen-age girls in the United States, only 72,800—less than one per cent—become out-of-wedlock mothers each year. As i said above, there’s only limited conclusions we can draw about comparative figures from these stories. They only tel us about the 1950s, not about today, so we’d have to find modern stories and figures for comparison. Not only that, but we would have to make sure, if we wanted to do a national comparison of the two periods, that we had comparable types of data (in terms of ages, etc.) for each period. I would add, though, **Bricker** , that stories like this _can_ help us illuminate another part of **Starving Artist** ’s general position, one not really dealt with in your OP. He not only makes assertions about changing rates of teen pregnancy, but in doing so (as with most of his other factual assertions) he links the figures to a more general moral decline in America that is, according to him, the result of liberalism and its permissive policies and lax moral standards. Furthermore, he generally seems to locate the start of this decline somewhere during the late 1960s, give or take a bit. These stories don’t allow us anything like definite conclusions about this issue. Indeed, definite conclusions about social and cultural trends are often hard to come by at the best of times; the nature of cultural history is such that we are essentially trying to understand broad ideas, ideals, _mentalités_, etc., which are often not amenable to empirical comparisons. Still, it seems to me that the stories above suggest that long-term changes in sexual morality, social permissiveness, and youth promiscuity were well underway, and were already the subject of some societal concern, well before the Civil Rights era and the feminist movement and the Great Society came along and fucked everything up. That is, even if we established that teenage promiscuity and pregnancies have increased over the past 40 years or so, it is by no means clear that this development is the result of modern liberal policies and permissiveness. The trend seems to have begun before the rise of **SA** ’s dreaded liberal ideology, so it could simply be that the trend continued despite (rather than because of) liberal ideology. A problem with history is that, while we can ask counterfactual questions and have interesting discussions about them, society does not provide a closed and controlled environment in which we can test out our alternative hypotheses. We can never know what would have happened with teenage pregnancy in the absence of post-60s liberalism. ---
**Author:** ![Mosier](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ea924/32.png) [@Mosier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mosier)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 9:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/47 "2009-11-02T09:26:55Z")
So the only actual hard numbers we have show that teens in the 50s gave birth at almost twice the rate of teens in the 2000s, right? All we’re doing now is pushing our own unprovable reasons why, so I’ll post mine. Teens in the 50s were very very (very VERY) much less likely to get education past high school, when compared to teens in the 2000s. Women in the 50s were probably also less likely to graduate high school at all. Teens in the 50s had much less access to sex education or birth control. Teens in the 50s were more likely to be raped or coerced, due to a culture which held women in lower esteem than today. Teens in the 50s received less responsible parenting, causing them to make poor decisions about sex and relationships. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 9:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/48 "2009-11-02T09:36:30Z")
> [@Mosier](#): > > STeens in the 50s were more likely to be raped or coerced, due to a culture which held women in lower esteem than today. I would dispute both the cause and the effect here. I don’t believe that fewer teens are raped today, simply because the opportunity today is much higher due to less supervision and more drug/alcohol use. And I don’t believe that women are held in higher esteem today. Quite the opposite. > [@](#): > > Teens in the 50s received less responsible parenting, causing them to make poor decisions about sex and relationships. 50 parents were _less_ responsible? Did “Happy Days” lie to me? Never mind. I see you said “unprovable reasons”. Carry on. ---
**Author:** ![Starving\_Artist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/aeb1de/32.png) [@Starving\_Artist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Starving_Artist)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 10:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/49 "2009-11-02T10:25:14Z")
With regard to \*\*mhendo’\*\*s post, it should be considered that the number of girls in these reports represents an almost infinitesimal percentage of the total number of teenage girls in school at that time, and that in many cases pregnancy was used as a tool to escape school rather than as the result of peer pressure or a cultural environment that encourages the sexual activity that results in it. It should also be considered that even though rumblings of social change certainly existed here and there prior to the counter-culture revolution of the late sixties, they were relatively minor in nature and most people either weren’t aware of them at all or understood them only poorly if they did. For example, beatniks and protest songs were around then, and in a sense they were the precursors of what was to follow a decade later, but society in the main held them in little regard, either not really getting them as was the case with folk protest songs, or mocking them as in the case of the beatniks, who were regular targets of fun on variety shows and late night talk shows of the time. And then there is also the influence of Playboy magazine to take into account. Clearly Playboy, having been in publication for five or six years by the time of **mhendo’s** cites, was already having an effect on the nation’s mores and views of sexuality by then. Furthermore, liberalism (which is, after all, the complaint, and not necessarily when it reached full bloom) had been reverberating in the nation’s think tanks and universites for decades even before the fifties, as evinced by William F. Buckley’s _God and Man at Yale_, published in 1951. The counter-culture revolution was merely the flash point that allowed liberal ideology to become predominant. Liberalism had already become the dominant philosophy in the nation’s news media, its colleges and universities, and Hollywood. Then, when the counter-culture revolution took place these entities were primed and ready to take advantage of it. This isn’t to say that they planned it in the first place, rather that they just happened to find themselves in the position of being able to take advantage of it and to spread the word, creating an impression throughout the country for the next thirty years that the liberal view was the one that every right thinking American held. So what this all boils down to in terms of my assertions regarding liberalism is that liberalism has created serious problems, including the subject of this thread’s OP: teen pregnancy, and from my standpoint it doesn’t really matter much when the liberal influences that caused these problems began. They are still the result of liberal ideology. The fifties appear ideal in conservative terms not because liberalism didn’t exist, but because it was a relatively weak undercurrent and conservative values predominated. Thus it shouldn’t be considered that the image of the conservative values and lifestyle of the fifties is rendered invalid simply because liberalism was already afoot then. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 11:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/50 "2009-11-02T11:23:54Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > So what this all boils down to in terms of my assertions regarding liberalism is that liberalism has created serious problems, including the subject of this thread’s OP: teen pregnancy, and from my standpoint it doesn’t really matter much when the liberal influences that caused these problems began. They are still the result of liberal ideology. The fifties appear ideal in conservative terms not because liberalism didn’t exist, but because it was a relatively weak undercurrent and conservative values predominated. So teen pregnancy is a problem created by liberalism, and you know this because it was worse when conservative values predominated. 😕 ---
**Author:** ![tagos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@tagos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tagos)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 11:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/51 "2009-11-02T11:40:04Z")
> [@gonzomax](#): > > There were stories of back alley abortions. Dangerous, expensive operations often performed by an unqualified person, who knew just a little more than did. You had to go through with it because it was definitely a black mark if an unmarried girl got preggers. The coat hanger crude abortions often resulted in emergency room visits. The results sometimes were the girl may never be able to have children when they were done butchering her. Rumors were some died. It was a scary and ugly time to get someone pregnant. If a girls family had money, it could be performed safely in a hospital. > There were no facilities to take care of pregnant students. they disappeared. There were homes for unwed mothers. In my area Vista Maria was run by gestapo nuns. It did not lack discipline. It was a home for girls the parents could not handle or ones that got pregnant. It had a lot more in common with a jail than a home. Ah - the Good Old Days \ ---
**Author:** ![RedFury](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ec9cab/32.png) [@RedFury](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RedFury)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 12:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/52 "2009-11-02T12:48:59Z")
“No time better than the past” pretty much encapsulates social conservatism, thus making today tomorrow’s “things were better in the Tens.” 'cept it’s all an illusion as morality has ebbed and flowed through the centuries. Always has, always will. As to whether sexual mores should be taught by society or the family – which is really the “debate” here – well, let’s just say I’m all for burning bras…however if you want to keep yours on, that’s fine as well. What’s “better”? Well, I’d start with simply being alive and staying that way for as long as possible. And it is demonstrably true that through science & technology we now live longer than ever as a species. What we do with that added time is up to each one of us. Me, I choose not to prune-up, turn bitter and wish for reverse time travel to an era that never was. It’s a mind-fuck anyway. Thus these _are_ the Good Old Days. Enjoy them while you still can. ---
**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, 1:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/53 "2009-11-02T13:19:11Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > I’d say it’s your analysis which is weakly grasped. Your double parking analogy doesn’t work. The driver started out alive - killing him is a change in status. > > But the woman started out non-pregnant. By your definition, her becoming pregnant was a problem. But now you’re saying that her going back to being non-pregnant is also a problem. To apply your analogy, you’re saying that double parking is wrong - but under no circumstances should we move the car to a legal parking space. > > The only defense for the pro-life position that abortion is always wrong is the claim that every pregnancy is a good thing and none should be terminated. But if every pregnancy is a good thing how can becoming pregnant be a problem as you claimed? You completely miss the point of the double-parking analogy. You focus on the change of status as though it’s the key piece. I could have just as easily said, “We cut off the left hand of a double-parker.” That leaves him status unchanged – at leats as far as life. Or we could confiscate the cars of double-parkers (a solution that actually appeals to my darker side). But each of those reactions would be grossly disproportionate to the initial crime. The ill that’s being done to fix the problem, in other words, so far outweighs the initial problem that even though it fixes the initial problem, it is an unsatisfactory solution. So even though some pregnancies are undesirable, in the sense that the better outcome would be that they never happened, it does not follow that abortion is a good thing, because that “cure” is worse than the “disease” it’s curing. Of course, you may disagree with that calculus. That’s fine, and obviously grist for the many, many threads we’ve had about abortion. What you cannot do is assert, as you’ve done here, that the either/or dilemma of good and bad is the only way to analyze the issue. That’s what the fallacy of the excluded middle refers to: the claim that there are only two possible positions to take. In fact, there are more. You may disagree with some of them; that doesn’t erase them. ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 1:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/54 "2009-11-02T13:28:49Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > …and that in many cases pregnancy was used as a tool to escape school rather than as the result of peer pressure or a cultural environment that encourages the sexual activity that results in it… May we assume that this is another of your wholly original observations, based on your common sense and life experiences, rather than something wherein a citation might be expected? ---
**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, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/55 "2009-11-02T13:35:48Z")
> [@elucidator](#): > > My reading of the _Gospel According to St. Arving_ suggests that this horror of promiscuous lascivity was the direct result of “liberal permissiveness”. The example of teen pregnancy is offered as an example, a salient point. The suggestion is that this is but one of many examples. So many that if this one be weakened, or even shot down in cited flame, it is not crucial. The point remains that liberal permisiveness is the root cause of rampant STDs, drug use, and the designated hitter rule. And, of course, snotty teenagers in funny clothes. > [@mhendo](#): > > Some digging in newspaper databases has revealed some stories that add a bit of detail to the figures given by **jsgoddess** in her post, above. While these newspaper articles do not, and cannot, answer the comparative question regarding teenage pregnancy and births in the 1950s compared to the present, they do give a sense of the scale of the problem back then, and how it was perceived by contemporaries. > > I’ve placed in quotes some of the interesting sections from each story. Click on the titles to read the full (PDF) articles. > > [“District Seen Facing ‘Moral Catastrophe’ in Child Illegitimacy,” _Washington Post and Times Herald_, June 21, 1957.](https://jshare.johnshopkins.edu:443/mhender4/public_html/gen_images/50s1.pdf) > > [“Illegitimacy Rise Alarms Agencies: Aid vs. Punishment Debate Flares as the Rate Jumps Among Teen-Agers,” _New York Times_, August 9, 1959.](https://jshare.johnshopkins.edu:443/mhender4/public_html/gen_images/50s2.pdf) > > [“Problem of the Unwed Mother: Our Illegitimate Rate Is at an All-time High,” _Chicago Daily Tribune_, November 1, 1959.](https://jshare.johnshopkins.edu:443/mhender4/public_html/gen_images/50s3.pdf) > > [“New American Tragedy: Schoolgirl Mothers,” _Baltimore Sun_, June 8, 1958.](https://jshare.johnshopkins.edu:443/mhender4/public_html/gen_images/50s4.pdf)As i said above, there’s only limited conclusions we can draw about comparative figures from these stories. They only tel us about the 1950s, not about today, so we’d have to find modern stories and figures for comparison. Not only that, but we would have to make sure, if we wanted to do a national comparison of the two periods, that we had comparable types of data (in terms of ages, etc.) for each period. > > I would add, though, **Bricker** , that stories like this _can_ help us illuminate another part of **Starving Artist** ’s general position, one not really dealt with in your OP. He not only makes assertions about changing rates of teen pregnancy, but in doing so (as with most of his other factual assertions) he links the figures to a more general moral decline in America that is, according to him, the result of liberalism and its permissive policies and lax moral standards. Furthermore, he generally seems to locate the start of this decline somewhere during the late 1960s, give or take a bit. I’ve tried to avoid the “why” piece of the puzzle for now. if nothing else, it seems to suffer from the _post hoc, ergo propter hoc_\* fallacy: because the decline in values came after the rise of permissive liberalism, we assume it was caused by permissive liberalism. Even at best, it could be that both things were caused bya third, as yet unidentified factor. And at worst, it may be that the sequence of events is not even as we imagined it: reading those articles, perhaps the truth is that the fifties were the beginning of the rise in unwed pregnancies and it was the FORTIES that were the golden age as far as sexual morality and pregnancy were concerned. I don’t know, and I don’t think we have enough data on the table to even begin a run at that question yet. I do think that trying to resolve all of those complex questions when we have yet to nail down definitive stats for the question i posed in the OP is folly. ---
**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, 1:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/56 "2009-11-02T13:41:11Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > With regard to \*\*mhendo’\*\*s post, it should be considered that the number of girls in these reports represents an almost infinitesimal percentage of the total number of teenage girls in school at that time, and that in many cases pregnancy was used as a tool to escape school rather than as the result of peer pressure or a cultural environment that encourages the sexual activity that results in it. > [@elucidator](#): > > May we assume that this is another of your wholly original observations, based on your common sense and life experiences, rather than something wherein a citation might be expected? No. The citation was the stories that **mhendo** posted: > [@mhendo](#): > > I’ve placed in quotes some of the interesting sections from each story. Click on the titles to read the full (PDF) articles. > > [“District Seen Facing ‘Moral Catastrophe’ in Child Illegitimacy,” _Washington Post and Times Herald_, June 21, 1957.](https://jshare.johnshopkins.edu:443/mhender4/public_html/gen_images/50s1.pdf) > > > [@](#): > > > > …the report is based on detailed records of children from 13 of the city’s 23 junior high schools. > > > > \ > > > > In a number of instances, children have “made an effort to become pregnant to stop school.” If the pregnancy occurs in the 13th or 14th year and they are forced to return to school a number of these children have sought to get pregnant again. > > > > \ > > > > Dr. Pate cited another case in which a woman receiving welfare funds has seven illegitimate children and now her 12-year-old daughter is pregnant. > > > > Illegitimacy statistics, Dr. Pate said, fall far short of the actual number because many cases are not reported. ---
**Author:** ![elucidator](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8edcca/32.png) [@elucidator](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elucidator)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 1:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/57 "2009-11-02T13:59:15Z")
Apologies. The sheer massive stupidity of the notion caused me to make an erroneous assumption. ---
**Author:** ![Gorsnak](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gorsnak/32/7587_2.png) [@Gorsnak](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gorsnak)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 2:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/58 "2009-11-02T14:18:55Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > And at worst, it may be that the sequence of events is not even as we imagined it: reading those articles, perhaps the truth is that the fifties were the beginning of the rise in unwed pregnancies and it was the FORTIES that were the golden age as far as sexual morality and pregnancy were concerned. Well, it’s tricky to impregnate _American_ teenage girls when you’re stationed in Europe. I would expect that WWII would throw a big wrench into teenage pregnancy statistics in the 40’s, and that we’d need to look at the 30’s as well in order to distinguish between trends and aberrations. ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 2:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/59 "2009-11-02T14:25:42Z")
> [@Gorsnak](#): > > Well, it’s tricky to impregnate _American_ teenage girls when you’re stationed in Europe. I would expect that WWII would throw a big wrench into teenage pregnancy statistics in the 40’s, and that we’d need to look at the 30’s as well in order to distinguish between trends and aberrations. Yeah, I guess it also depends on when in the fifties you’re looking at: the late 1940’s or the early 1960’s? 😃 ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [November 2, 2009, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996/60 "2009-11-02T14:29:41Z")
> [@Starving\_Artist](#): > > Your position seems to be that abortion isn’t a problem so teen pregnancy isn’t a problem. > > But abortion is not a good thing. It’s costly for the kids and their families who have to come up with the money to pay for it; it creates stress, tension and unhappiness between pregnant teens and their parents and sometimes even between the parents themselves. That may all be true, and in some cases it certainly is (in some, it’s frankly not a big deal) but it’s still not the same as a pregnancy carried to term. You cannot lump them together and pretend they’re the same thing. They are not. An illegitimate birth is a completely different situation and \*\*it’s unambiguously what you’ve been complaining about all along \*\*- kids born to teenaged mothers. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tings-were-better-in-the-fifties-vol-i-teen-pregnancy-the-sa-debate-series/515996.md?page=4)