Falling teen pregnancy and abortion

This is a great article at Slate that provides evidence that later onset of sex and increased use of IUDs in particular have reduced teenage pregnancy and abortion significantly. The author explains that people, especially young people, do not use condoms or take the pill reliably. And it sounds like modern IUDs are superior to the old ones. (Thanks to Jason Malloy).

How to reduce teen pregnancy

Want to reduce teen pregnancy? Then make it hard to get an abortion. Using state-level data, Marshall Medoff finds that raising the cost of abortions, Medicaid funding restrictions, and informed consent laws lower rates of teenage pregnancy. The author concludes that youths are more careful about sex if abortions are harder to get.  

More teenage pregnancy accompanies greater female power

Female decision makers vs Teenage pregnancy--Share

This link takes you to a scatterplot of a sample of countries that shows a close relationship between the percent of decision-makers who are females and the percent of 20 year old women who got pregnant as teenagers (R-squared = .69). I interpret this as greater power among women leading to greater general female autonomy and more promiscuous teenage girls. Your thoughts?

Sex education, birth control, and sex: What's the relationship between sex education and behavior? The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health asked 6,411 teens in 1994 if: 1) they had learned about pregnancy in school, 2) they've had sex, and 3) they used birth control the first time.


Percent who have had sex

Taught about pregnancy in school 41.0
Not taught 33.7


Percent who used protection the first time

Taught about pregnancy in school 67.4
Not taught 57.9


Percent who have had sex and did it unprotected the first time

Taught about pregnancy in school 13.4
Not taught 14.2


Looking at the top numbers, those taught about pregnancy in school were more likely to have sex. They were also more likely to use protection the first time. The two patterns basically offset each other: the bottom numbers show us that the percent of kids who have had sex and did it with no birth control is roughly the same for the two groups.

Liberalism doesn't stop unwanted pregnancies, but it sure as hell kills a LOT of fetuses: Democrats tell us that the answer to reducing abortions among teens is not to make them illegal; rather, we need to support and expand the programs which address the factors that lead to abortion. In other words, we need to put Democrats in charge of the problem.

So, is there empirical support for this idea? Using Guttmacher and County and City Book data, I calculated the correlation between voting Democrat in 2004 and abortion rates among white girls ages 15-19 across the 32 states for which data are available. While I was at it I also looked at pregnancy rates (for white girls 15-19) and white IQ rates (Audacious' data):


Pearson correlation coefficients, N = 32

percent Democrat--abortion rate .64
percent Democrat--pregnancy rate -.15
pregnancy rate--abortion rate .11
IQ--pregnancy rate, -.65
IQ--abortion .14
IQ--percent Democrat .22

If you want to reduce abortions, the LAST thing you want to do is trust Democrats to do it--the positive correlation between the two is large.

And it's those idiot Red States that have all the white teen pregnancies, right? You know, the abstinence-type approach and all the Bible thumpers are total failures, compared to the scientific liberal strategy. Hardly--the correlation is trivial in size (-.15).

And the idea that (Republican) states that have all the pregnancies will consequently have all the abortions falls apart here as well--the correlation once again is insignificant (.11).

So, in other words, liberalism doesn't stop unwanted pregnancies, but it sure as hell kills a LOT of fetuses.

While I'm at it, I wanted to look at white IQ. My analysis supports the idea that smart states are able to avoid unwanted pregnancies (r = -.65) making them not have higher abortion rates (r = .14).

Finally, the positive association between being a Democrat state and having a high white mean IQ is small (.22).

Everybody's a sociologist when it comes to teen marriage: Let me follow-up on my last post with a comment on today's article in the NYT on teenage pregnancy. They took news of Palin's daughter's pregnancy as an opprtunity to remind readers how teenagers, especially girls, are doomed if they get married and have babies when they're teenagers.

What has happened to Bristol is not the best way to go, but let's use our brains for a second. First, early marriage was widespread 20 years before the divorce explosion of 1965-75. Most divorces take place in the first few years of marriage. If I get time, maybe I can look at this more closely, but I'm guessing that the divorce rate among those who married at 18 in 1950 was lower than those of people marrying at 30 nowadays. There isn't something inherent in early marriage that is conducive to divorce and failure.

Second, so many of these studies on negative outcomes assume that those who have babies as teens are in all important ways the same as those who don't. I haven't seen these studies typically control for things like IQ, talent, farsightedness, self-contol, industriousness, persistence, etc. I have read studies that have indicated that teens who have babies would have turned out poor even if they hadn't gotten pregnant.

To use a personal example, as I did in the last post. My brother got a girl pregnant when both of them were 16. He and the girl were excellent students, but their strict religious upbringing led them to have sex without confronting head-on what they were doing and what needed to be done to prevent pregnancy. (Plus, my bro was unhappy at home and irrationally thought a pregnancy might be a way out).

So the girl got pregnant. Most kids in their shoes would have gotten an abortion, but our type of people is a tad uncomfortable with slaughtering children, especially our own. Our parents and her parents pushed for adoption, but my brother and the girl told them all to go pound sand. They got married in our church 5 months before the baby was born.

Fast forward two decades. My brother has almost finished his MBA, he is the regional director over a number of large assisted-living facilities, and he makes probably three times what I make. His wife got her B.A. and was a very popular local TV news anchor for several years. Double careers were a little too much for them, so she scaled back her career a bit.

They have four beautiful children, and the oldest (the one conceived out of wedlock) has earned a 4-year full-tuition scholarship to a university where the average ACT is close to 30. He is majoring in math, and his college GPA is just about perfect.

Now, of course the sociologists would have predicted disaster for my brother and his wife. So why was the prediction wrong? Because sociologists, along with America's elites, believe that you are the product of your circumstances. If you get zapped with a baby at 17, you're done for. My bro and his wife made it because they are industrious, talented, relentless people. They would have been successful without the early marriage; they were successful with it.

If a sociologist says so, you know he can't be completely right.