12:45 p.m. | Updated to clarify, making distinction between pregnancy and childbirth.
Researchers have long tried to untangle the complicated mix of economics, culture, education and contraception (or lack thereof) that leads to teenage pregnancy.
Despite a decline in births to American teenage mothers over the past two decades, the United States stands out among developed nations in that its teenagers are much more likely to give birth than their peers in Canada, Germany, Norway, Russia (a country that is still advancing on the spectrum of development) or Switzerland.
A new study by Melissa S. Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland, and Phillip B. Levine, an economist at Wellesley College, builds on their previous research looking at the link between income inequality and rates of teenage childbirth.
It turns out the connection is quite striking.
In general, teenage childbirth is more common among poor girls. But poor girls who live in places with a high level of inequality — meaning that the ratio of income at the median of the income distribution to
the income at the 10th percentile of the income distribution is higher than in other places — are even more likely to bear children as teenagers.
The new paper looks at inequality across states and finds a very similar correlation between the rate of teenage births and income inequality. For example, a teenage girl in Mississippi is four times more likely to give birth than a teenage girl in New Hampshire. The researchers conclude that teenagers in the highest-inequality states are roughly five percentage points more likely to give birth as teenagers than teenagers in the lowest-inequality states.
Inequality, the authors suggest, makes the poorest citizens believe that they have little chance of economic mobility. They are giving birth “at a young age instead of investing in their own economic progress because they feel they have little chance of advancement,” the authors write.
In fact, the authors point out that other research has shown that poor girls who have babies when they are teenagers do not suffer much worse economic outcomes in the long term than their peers who wait to have children. Teenage childbearing is “a symptom, not a cause” of poverty and economic immobility, Mr. Levine said in an interview.
Policy prescriptions, he said, should focus more on improving economic opportunities than merely persuading more teenagers to use birth control. “People like to focus on the thing that happens right before you have the baby, like sex education, birth control, abstinence,” Mr. Levine said. “An important point from our research is that that’s not going to solve the problem. Really what you need to do is improve their life chances in a much broader sense, which will then lead to lower rates of teen childbearing and better economic outcomes subsequently.”
The authors do acknowledge that a change in inequality does not explain the drop in teenage childbirth in the United States over the last two decades. That, they say, is a topic for more study.