Please provide cites from credible, unbiased sources for the percentage of unwed pregnant teenagers in the USA during the 50s who underwent illegal back-alley abortions, and went to the emergency room as a result. Also provide a cite for the percentage of unwed, pregnant teenagers in the USA during the 1950s who became infertile as a result.
Regards,
Shodan
I posted what I think is a pretty solid answer for your original question up-thread, there hasn’t been any sizable increase in the rate of unwed pregnancies (leading to birth) amongst teens since the 50’s. A womans chance of being unmarried and prgenant in her teens is about equal today as to what it was in 1957.
Technically your original question was “number” not “rate”, but I assume you meant rate, since the number of about everything has probably increased since the fifties due to increasing population.
I’m not sure we can dismiss abortion so easily. I think we can agree that the number of teens who get abortions this year will be dramatically higher than the number of teens who got abortions in, say, 1957. Yes?
So even if I accept your conclusion that total unwed pregnancy that leads to birth is about the same, we have all those additional pregnancies now that end in abortion, which should rachet up today’s numbers.
Or am i missing something?
You’re missing that for the totality of teenagers, married or not, the rate of births has halved. There is no reliable data available on the rate of abortions in the 50s, but “only” about 25-30% of pregnant teenagers have abortions today. Which means abortions cannot explain the decrease in births even if there were none in the 50s - there logically must be a decrease in the rate of teen pregnancies.
Also take the fact that the average age of marriage for girls in the US is about 25 today while it was 20 in the 50s. In other words, we would expect the % of married girls age 15 - 18 (pregnant or not) to be lower now than it was in the 50s. And we have seen no data yet on how many of those unwed girls today are actually in a stable relationship.
I guess I don’t really understand the point of convolving the two, even if we accept that both teenage unwed mothers and abortions are bad things (and I doubt everyone agrees that the latter is bad), they seem pretty different types of socital evil. Plus, as I said before, I think we can answer the first question, but I doubt you’ll ever find clear statistics on the number of teen abortions in the 50’s.
And, FWIW, I think the result is interesting. I was suprised, and I think a lot of others would be, by the fact that the rate of unwed pregnancies coming to term is more or less the same now as it was in '57.
I said “credible” and “unbiased”.
Regards,
Shodan
More to the point: you also said “percentages” which do not appear to be present in the cite gonzomax offered. Even if we assume the author is credible and unbiased, it merely repeats the generalized claim. Undoubtedly there were more amateur, back-alley abortions when the procedure was not legal… the question is (I assume) how MANY more? Ten? A hundred? A thousand?
Well, can we at least assume that since there is legalized access to relatively safe abortions now, the percentage was higher in the 50s?
So in 1957, 96 out of every 1,000 teenagers (married and unmarried alike) gave birth. We will assume that abortions were vanishingly small and are not a factor, so that 96 out of ever 1,000 teenagers became pregnant that year.
Only 13% of those were non-marital. So in 1957, 12 teenagers out of 1,000 gave birth out of wedlock.
Now we look at 2000. In 2000, 49 teenagers out of 1000 gave birth, married and unmarried alike. We’ll apply 1997’s number to this figure, assuming it’s not too different from 2000’s. 28 abortions were obtained per 1,000 teenagers, meaning that 77 out of 1,000 teenagers became pregnant that year – 49 gave birth and 28 had abortions. It’s not central to the meat of the matter, anyway.
79% of those 49 who gave birth were not married. That means that 39 teens who gave birth in 2000 were not married.
**
In 1957, 12 teenagers out of 1,000 gave birth out of wedlock.
In 2000, 39 teenagers out of 1,000 gave birth out of wedlock.
**
I’m not a statistician, so I’d be interested to hear of any boneheaded mistakes I may have made in the preceding analysis.
No.
Regards,
Shodan
Shodan: why not? It seems pretty clear to me that the percentage of emergency room visits from illegal back-alley abortions was higher then than it is now, simply by force of reasoning. Ditto for sterility as a result of same.
I suspect your “no” has to do more with a sense of, “They want to play the ‘cite’ game? Fine. I’ll make them dig up a cite for everything.”
If that’s indeed the motive, I’d suggest it’s not a good way to proceed. Obviously, you may have a principled objection that I’m missing.
Well, sort of. This is, once again, excellent evidence of Starving Artist’s selective use of evidence.
It’s true that more than one of the articles made the claim that some teenage girls got pregnant to avoid school. They never said how many; they never even asserted that such girls constituted anything like a majority. In fact, the piece you quoted said specifically, “In a number of instances…” The other quotes say that “some” and “a few” girls got pregnant for this reason. I don’t know how many that is. Do you? Do you think Starving Artist knows? Surely if it were a high proportion of the total, the stories would have mentioned it.
And yet, on the basis of such evidence, Starving Artist gives us:
Many? Not one of those quotes says many, or even implies that such girls constituted anything like a majority.
Furthermore, a few of the quotes i gave specifically provide reason to think that “peer pressure or a cultural environment that encourages the sexual activity” that leads to pregnancy might have been a factor. More than one of the articles note the rise of “going steady,” and i quoted the last one as noting that “going steady” was considered by some girls a marker of their good looks and popularity. If you open and read the full articles i linked, you’ll see there are more references to such things. Surely it’s reasonable to attribute a desire for popularity, at least in part, to “peer pressure.”
There are also explicit assertions by sociologists and by the journalists who wrote the articles that the “cultural environment” related to sexual activity had been changing. Here’s one bit, taken directly from one of the quotes in my earlier post:
And yet, from all this, Starving Artist focuses on the girls (we don’t know how many) who were getting pregnant to get out of school, and completely ignores the evidence that cultural changes and peer pressure were, in fact, a factor in teen pregnancy, according to the doctors and sociologists who were actually studying the issue in the 1950s.
The sheer hubris of the guy, when his cherry-picking is right there for everyone to see, is beyond belief. The fact that you’re willing to take lots of time and dozens of posts debating with his detractors, and yet you don’t seem interested in responding directly to any of his own obfuscation, is somewhat puzzling to me.
Oh wait, I found something. from what seems to be a respectable* site
If we’re to assume the worst case for abortion, why not the worst case for unwanted children? Lost educational and employment opportunities, leading to frustration and child abuse and such, turning the child into someone more likely to eventually abuse teir own children.
As for shrinking marriage rates, may as well blame Ronald Reagan for “normalizing” divorce (i.e. while governor of California, signed the first no-fault divorce law in the U.S.) so if marriage is largely seen today as someting unecessary, it was because a conservative conceded the point.
And it’s interesting how these numbers are often misused to suggest an abortion ban would be no big deal.
I just figure if it’s not meant to be a big deal, why have it at all?
Only if you consider abortion itself to be either morally positive or morally neutral.
I’m not sure how morality enters into it - reproduction is a fairly mundane (and by no means universal) biological imperative.
I don’t agree that “many” means or implies a majority. But I do agree with you: there’s no support in any linked article for just how widespread that particular phenomenon was. On the other hand, I don’t agree with your view that “surely” it would have been mentioned if it were a high proportion of the total – apart from self-reporting, how would it be known?
In short, in my view, the case simply isn’t proven one way or the other. It happened, and we don’t have any evidence at all of how frequently it happened.