Teens in the United States are far more likely to give birth than in any other
industrialized country in the world. U.S. teens are two and a half times as
likely to give birth as compared to teens in Canada, around four times as likely
as teens in Germany or Norway, and almost 10 times as likely as teens in Switzerland.
Among more developed countries, Russia has the next highest teen birth rate after
the United States, but an American teenage girl is still around 25 percent more likely
to give birth than her counterpart in Russia. Moreover, these statistics incorporate
the almost 40 percent fall in the teen birth rate that the United States has experienced
over the past two decades. Differences across U.S. states are quite dramatic as
well. A teenage girl in Mississippi is four times more likely to give birth than a teenage
girl in New Hampshire—and 15 times more likely to give birth as a teen compared
to a teenage girl in Switzerland.
This paper has two overarching goals: understanding why the teen birth rate
is so high in the United States and understanding why it matters. Thus, we begin by
examining multiple sources of data to put current rates of teen childbearing into
the perspective of cross-country comparisons and recent historical context. We
examine teen birth rates alongside pregnancy, abortion, and “shotgun” marriage
rates as well as the antecedent behaviors of sexual activity and contraceptive use.
We seek insights as to why the rate of teen childbearing is so unusually high in the
United States as a whole, and in some U.S. states in particular. We argue that explanations
that economists have tended to study are unable to account for any sizable