Some prominent sociologists argue that teen pregnancy, when it occurs, is functional. Teen pregnancy is a foolish life choice for middle-class teens, because they’re sacrificing bright futures. Lower-class teens, in contrast, don’t have bright futures to sacrifice, so why wait to become a parent? I’m skeptical of the underlying counter-factuals, but never mind that. Frank Furstenberg’s “Teenage Childbearing and Cultural Rationality” (Family Relations, 1992) rebuts the functionalists with a thought experiment that is as powerful as it is concise:
[I]f they had to take a pill for a month in order to become pregnant, relatively few teenagers, especially those of school age, would become parents. And, if they had to obtain permission from their parents to take that pregnancy pill, very few parents would give their consent.
In other words, the main source of teen pregnancy is just impulsiveness. If youths act on their immediate feelings, pregnancy swiftly follows whether they want to get pregnant or not.
READER COMMENTS
Emily
Aug 7 2019 at 9:49am
The “just impulsiveness” link is to the Edin book about poor single moms. But most poor single moms were not teenage mothers. I think the ‘why wait to become a parent’? story makes more sense for women in their 20s, even their early-to-mid-20s, who have children without being married to someone responsible or being in jobs that let them support a child. I do think the opportunity cost of not waiting is much lower than it is for women who can realistically hold out for those things, and that many of them would take a pill to become pregnant.
RPLong
Aug 7 2019 at 10:19am
It’s not obvious to me that low-income teens who lack a safety net in the form of a stable home environment and parents with high enough incomes to handle an unexpected pregnancy really do have a lower opportunity cost.
Josh
Aug 7 2019 at 10:19am
This “reversal” idea seems like a powerful thought experiment in general.
Eg imagine reversing work vs non-work. Eg imagine we had a $25k UBI and (poor) people were forced to work at a full time job stocking shelves. But they could get out of stocking shelves and stay home all day if they paid $25k. Or they could pay $5k and only have to work 32 hours/week instead of 40, etc.
What’s the outcome? Would all of the current poor work 40 hours? Would some of them pay to work less than 40?
Loquitur Veritatem
Aug 7 2019 at 10:41am
In other words, the main source of teen pregnancy is just impulsiveness.
Duh.
nobody.really
Aug 7 2019 at 1:12pm
I wonder if this argument misses some important dynamics.
1: Yes, teens get pregnant through impulsiveness. But that’s true of rich and poor teens alike. Thus, the phenomenon we’re exploring is not which teens get pregnant, but which teens choose to get abortions.
2: People crave having a social role. Student is a social role. Employee/entrepreneur is a social role. Once you’re out of school (by graduation or dropping out), and if you can’t acquire a new role as employee or entrepreneur, you become self-conscious of your lack of social role.
Moreover, OTHERS notice your social role, and treat you accordingly. In particular, in some cultures, men aggressively express their sexual desire for young women, which can make women uncomfortable. But some of these men change their behavior when they confront the same young woman pushing a baby stroller. In the eyes, motherhood is a social role that justifies more respectful behavior.
Thus, a woman who a) finds herself pregnant, b) does not see a promising future that would be impeded by motherhood, and c) DOES see a social role for herself that seems more appealing than her current role–THAT woman may well elect single motherhood, whereas women in other circumstances would not.
3: Finally, some women may well choose single motherhood as the best of the options they face. This is especially true among black women. For whatever reasons, black people in the US tend to marry other black people. Yet the supply of marriageable black men is lower than the supply of marriageable black women. This occurs because black men have a higher mortality rate than black women. And because black men have a lower rate of “marriage eligibility” (roughly, lower educational attainment, higher rates of criminal convictions, etc.) than black women. And because when interracial marriages occur, they generally involve a black man marrying a woman of a different race. Black women, faced with the choice of a) marrying a man who will be more of a hindrance than a help in order to have kids, b) remaining single and childless, or c) remaining single and having kids, may well choose option c).
Floccina
Aug 7 2019 at 2:53pm
Floccina
Aug 7 2019 at 2:58pm
More…
LemmusLemmus
Aug 7 2019 at 2:38pm
The story is incomplete unless an explanation is added for why those impulsive teens do not get an abortion. Maybe it’s possible to add a convincing explanation for this, but without it, the above is not much of an explanation.
(Also, I do not see why the quoted statement is taken as self-evidently true.)
Seth Green
Aug 7 2019 at 2:44pm
An alternative interpretation is that teens-who-might-get-pregnant have a lot of private information about their future prospects, and they correctly estimate that a pregnancy won’t have a lot of impact on their incomes, but might have a lot of impact in terms of meaning. Comparing outcomes between those who had miscarriages with those who didn’t bears this out a bit:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3891739/
Joseph E Munson
Aug 8 2019 at 7:38pm
impulsiveness and a strange aversion to abortion.
Franco Bertucci
Aug 24 2019 at 8:58pm
A “strange aversion” which the majority of people have. Is it not natural to have an aversion to terminating one’s own offspring?
Miguel Madeira
Aug 9 2019 at 7:51am
I think that we can’t easily split “impulsiveness” from “incentives” – if being impulsive has a 5% probabality of a financial loss of $5.000, probably you will be more impulsive than if being impulsive has a 5% probability of a financial loss of $100.000.
Radford Neal
Aug 10 2019 at 8:55pm
This post assumes that the “impulse” leading to pregnancy is less indicative of what one might call the woman’s “true motivations” than whatever they do non-impulsively. But why assume that?
There’s an obvious selective pressure for people to behave in ways that lead to them having children (though some behaviours selected in the past may not be adaptive in the present). From this perspective, the “impulsive” decision would be a mistake only if it leads to the woman having fewer children over her lifetime, which off-hand seems unlikely (though conceivable, no pun intended).
Of course, one doesn’t have to adopt this perspective as normative. But if someone seems to have different impulsive and non-impulsive goals, dismissing the impulses as just some sort of mistake doesn’t seem right.
Michael Stack
Aug 14 2019 at 10:35am
I think you’re missing the marginal aspect of this.
Yes, of course – the primary reason poor kids (or most people in general) get pregnant is because sex is tons of fun. I don’t think anyone is suggesting people get pregnant on purpose because of their dim life prospects.
Rather, the argument is that the dim life prospects erode the incentive to worry about the future, making impulsive sex more attractive, *at the margin*.
Frankly I think this is totally correct. It is more of an empirical matter whether this effect of reduced incentives to be responsible is the primary driver of poor teen pregnancy, or whether it is poor impulse control. I suspect the latter but don’t know for sure.
Comments are closed.