Teen childbearing is widely considered to be a major social problem in the United States. There are currently more than 400,000 teen births per year. Births to teen mothers account for roughly one-quarter of the nearly 1.5 mil- lion births per to unmarried women in the United States each year.1 Women who give birth during their teenage years experience negative economic and social outcomes, both in the immediate years and during early adulthood. They are more likely than other women to drop out of high school, to remain unmarried, and to live in poverty. The children of teenage mothers fare worse than other children on economic, social, and cognitive dimensions.2
In the year 2004, roughly seventy-two of every 1,000 girls age fifteen to nineteen in the United States became pregnant, and forty-one out of 1,000 gave birth. Cumulatively, nearly 30 percent of females become pregnant before age twenty and more than 20 percent give birth before age twenty. There is large variation in rates of teen pregnancy and childbearing across racial and ethnic groups, as shown in table 8.1. In 2004, the pregnancy rate among black and Hispanic teens was more than twice as high as among white teens. The birth rate among Hispanic teens was 82.6 per 1,000, com- pared to 63.1 among black teens and 26.7 among white teens.3
The good news is that in 2004, the U.S. teen pregnancy rate was at its lowest level in thirty years, 38 percent lower t