Over at Vox, Sarah Kliff has a long, interesting dive into the recent downward acceleration in the teen birth and teen pregnancy rates, and the insufficiency of the various theories (the Great Recession, greater IUD usage, the “Teen Mom” effect) proffered to explain it. She leaves the reader with the image of a “perfect storm” — “a collision of lots of trends that all serendipitously happened in the late 2000s and early 2010s,” and suggests that “we may have just gotten lucky.”
This seems like a suitably-humble read on the available data, but as you’d expect I have a few less-immediately-measurable theories about what’s going on here. The first is that we shouldn’t underestimate the behavior-shaping power of a cultural consensus: We live in a society that’s deeply, anxiously divided over issues related to sexual activity and childbearing, but the idea that we should (and, just as importantly, can) reduce the teen birth rate unites just about every faction in American politics and culture, from abstinence pledgers to Bloombergist technocrats to left-wing sex educators, and done so has more or less since the teen birth rate spiked in the 1980s. (Even in Hollywoodland, where permissiveness generally rules the day, quickie divorces and unwed baby bumps are unremarkable, but pregnant teenage starlets and heartthrob baby daddies − for sound careerist reasons, of course − are vanishingly rare.)
True, this consensus’s “red” and “blue” variations, emphasizing chastity and contraception, are very different on the extremes (and the influence of pro-life sentiment may play an interesting role that’s too complicated to get into here) … but they blur together in many contexts, and even when left and right promote radically different means the basic message and sought-after end is much the same: However you manage to avoid getting pregnant as a teenager, avoid it you definitely should. And as Kliff notes, both emphases have seen results: teen contraceptive use has increased overall since the ’80s and teen sexual activity has been increasingly delayed, more high schoolers are virgins, etc.
The scared-careful propaganda of “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom,” in this sense, may have played some causal role in shaping teen behavior, but more importantly MTV’s productions embody a consensus that already existed, and reflect cultural momentum already at work. And that momentum, too, matters to behavior: the concept of “tipping points” may be somewhat overdrawn, but peer effects being what they are, it seems perfectly plausible that social trends might hit accelerative points, where (in this case) the increasing rarity of teenage pregnancy sharpens the purely social, peer-group-driven incentives encouraging chastity and careful contraceptive use even when other factors (economic trends, public policy, etc.) are more constant or less obviously influential. If divorce is contagious, in other words, why not sexual responsibility? (Especially since teenagers don’t generally get pregnant on their own: It still takes two, and so one person’s irresponsibility can be cancelled out by their partner’s caution, and increasing responsibility can have a compounding effect.)
This possibility makes a case for being relatively optimistic that today’s trend will, in fact, persist, and that tomorrow’s teen birth rate could be lower still than today’s. At the same time, it leaves room for pessimism about whether our culture’s success in this area can be easily translated to the broader problem of adult out-of-wedlock births, adult family instability, and the cultural and socioeconomic problems associated with those trends.
For one thing, there’s less consensus in those areas: Some on the left don’t think family breakdown is necessarily a problem at all (it’s a transformation, not a breakdown, they would say), and some on the center-left agree it’s a problem, but think that it’s too deeply-rooted in structural changes to be effectively addressed. And the latter group has a point insofar as the anti-teen pregnancy model can’t be neatly applied to adult behavior, because all that the campaign against teen pregnancy has really asked of young people is the temporary postponement of sexual activity/promiscuity/fertility, at an age when parental authority already tends to make sex at least inconvenient and having children seems considerably less appealing than it might later on in life. (Not that teenage parents can’t want children; the literature on teen pregnancy shows that they often do, that it’s seen as a mark of adulthood, a source of love and intimacy, etc. But a child is still much more likely to be seen as a burden than it might be later on.) You’re dealing with a largely-institutionalized and supervised population and a short time horizon, in other words, with clear milestones ahead (wait till college … wait till you’re out of the house …), no immediate biological-clock issues, less pressure from peers and partners to make a home or life, etc. Which means that you can change behavior for the better without having to address the deep drivers of family instability in our society, and indeed without even necessarily having to figure out what those drivers (economic, cultural, both) really are.
But changing behavior over the life cycle is a different matter; there you may need a deeper change in the cultural and/or socioeconomic context to make real gains. Telling an 16-year-old girl that she needs to use birth control consistently until she meets Mr. Right has its challenges, because teenagers of both sexes are immature and hormonal and volatile and all the rest − but in practical, rational-choice terms it’s very different from telling a 27-year-old woman to do the same, because by that point maybe she’s decided that her community doesn’t actually have that many Mr. Rights, the economy/culture of masculinity/incarceration rate being what it is, and so by telling her to wait a a little longer you’re actually telling her that she might not have the two kids she really wants, even though she feels capable of raising them herself if things with her live-in boyfriend don’t work out, and who are you to judge …. ? Telling a 15-year-old guy that “true love waits” can work in a culture that values chastity, that has clear scripts for dating and courtship that are widely shared and understood, that doesn’t treat twentysomething virginity as a pitiable affliction or early marriage as a totally-unreasonable, doomed-to-failure choice … but in a more scriptless, permissive, and late-marrying culture, the message that guy is likely to internalize and find plausible is “wait till college/you’re out of the house,” with a multi-partner, higher-risk model still awaiting once adulthood is achieved.
And the potential problem with a “wait till college/till you’re out of the house” message on sexual activity, and a “wait till Mr. Right” message on contraception, is that neither offers any practical guidance for what exactly to do once you’re 19 or 23 or 27, how to think about sexuality and courtship and mating before you marry, how to actually find that Mr. Right. Those anti-teen pregnancy messages may succeed in postponing bad choices until adulthood, in other words, without necessarily helping people make good choices once they enter grown-up life.
Which isn’t to say that postponement isn’t preferable to the alternative. Delaying irresponsibility till adulthood makes it, well, less irresponsible, and not having a kid at 17 by itself suffices, for obvious reasons, to raise your chances of a stable family life, as does every delay thereafter. But to date, in the big picture, the strides we’ve made in reducing teenage pregnancy and births haven’t translated into a reversal of working and middle class family life’s slow disintegration; quite the opposite, in fact. Perhaps that will change; the out-of-wedlock birth rate finally stopped rising in the last couple of years, and it’s possible that the teenage birth rate’s recent decline will start to have major positive follow-on effects as today’s teenagers move through their life cycles. But for now, what’s happened with teen pregnancy is both a real and welcome success and one whose ripple effects have been more limited than we might have hoped.