Why Teen Pregnancy Isn’t Important

Last one today, I swear. Hot Air Headlines linked to an NYT piece entitled The Sleepover Question, which advocates allowing teens to sleep with their partners openly at home.

Obviously sleepovers aren’t a direct route to family happiness. But even the most traditional parents can appreciate the virtue of having their children be comfortable bringing a girlfriend or boyfriend home, rather than have them sneak around.

As a “most traditional parent,” I can tell you immediately that the author made that bald assertion up. But it gets worse. This fledgling logician leaps from “American parents don’t let kids sleep together” to “American parents don’t educate their children about sex and contraceptives.”

Balderdash.

But having made that ill-considered leap, she trots out this tremendous advantage of the Dutch, who are more permissive, over Americans:

Widespread use of oral contraceptives contributes to low teenage pregnancy rates — more than 4 times lower in the Netherlands than in the United States.

Which brings me to the title. “Teenage pregnancy rates” is pretty meaningless, because it includes ages 15-19 (ages 14 and below have a very small pregnancy rate). But most of us don’t care if a girl gets pregnant after high school – they are no longer children/wards of the state at that point; their lives are their own.*

What we definitely do care about is the 15-17 age group, who are still children and should be pursuing their high school education. Their pregnancy rate is 1/3 of the 18-19 group, and almost 1/2 of the average. Here’s a plot by Child Trends Data Bank:

If you consider race, you find that 15-17 year old non-hispanic whites have roughly 1/4 the chance of experiencing a teen pregnancy as do hispanics & blacks. That suggests a significant environmental factor going well beyond sex education or openness to teen sexuality in families.

So these discussions of the “teen pregnancy problem” are pointless w/o breaking the data down by age and demographics, as are comparisons with countries like the Netherlands.

A couple of final gripes:

• Why compare with the Netherlands? It is true that it has the lowest pregnancy rate among developed countries, , but it is anomalously low compared to all other developed countries, and the demographics are nothing like those of the US. You might as well compare to South Korea, which has half the pregnancy rate of the Netherlands, and has a more repressive treatment of sexuality than the US.
• All the data for the Netherlands is old. I searched the web for recent data, and all I found was stuff based on a survey from 1995-1998. Using data from 25 years ago to justify current policies is misleading. *Update – I found a fact sheet from 2006 that corroborates the low pregnancy rates up to that time.

*Another point is that women in the US get married an average of 2 years later than women in the Netherlands. That will drive the 18-19 year old pregnancy rates down considerably.