ajepa

abbyjean:

Teenage pregnancy is a poverty issue - the correlation is easy to see. The Guttmacher Institute’s report’s rankings of states by teen pregnancy rates looks eerily similar to the U.S. Census rankings of states by poverty rates. Mississippi, for example, has the nation’s highest rate of poverty and the third highest rate of teen pregnancies. New Mexico is third in poverty and second in teen pregnancies. Texas leads in teen pregnancies and comes in ninth in the poverty rankings. Other “risk factors” for teenage pregnancy — being a person of color, being disinterested in school, etc. — similarly dovetail with living in poverty.

In addition, of course, when a child is born to a poor teenage mother, the child is much more likely to grow up in poverty herself and continue the cycle as an adult. According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, a child born to an unmarried teen mother has a 27 percent chance of growing up in poverty. If the mother has not earned a high school diploma or equivalency degree, the child will grow up in poverty 64 percent of the time. If those numbers are correct, the steep decline in teen pregnancy rates between 1991 and 2002 kept 460,000 children out of poverty. Teen pregnancy is intrinsically a sensitive subject because of its relation to other tough topics like race, class and abortion - but the fact that poverty leads to teenage pregnancy and teenage pregnancy leads to poverty is too troubling not to address.