Family Marital Status and Living Arrangements - Teenage Pregnancy

Over the generations, a major change in American attitudes has removed much of the social stigma from unwed teenage motherhood. Unmarried women of all ages are having children openly and with a regularity that was unheard of just a few generations ago. Many women do not feel the need to marry when they become pregnant.

Many possible reasons are offered for the high rates of teenage motherhood. Among them are lack of access to birth control, lack of education, and little hope for the future, including absence of educational goals. What is certain is that the health of the babies born to teenagers, especially minorities, is often as risk. According to research conducted by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, African-American teenagers are twice as likely as white teenagers to deliver low-birth-weight babies and 1.5 times more likely to have premature babies. Both low-birth-weight and premature babies are subject to a number of serious health problems, as well as subsequent developmental problems. In general, babies born to teenage mothers of all races suffer a higher risk of low birth weight, preterm delivery, and infant mortality compared to babies born to older mothers.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics' National Vital Statistics Reports (vol. 50, no. 5, February 12,

TABLE 2.3
Total population by number of races reported, 2000

Number of races	Number	Percent of total population	Percent of total Two or more races population
Total population	281,421,906	100.0	(X)
One race	274,595,678	97.6	(X)
Two or more races	6,826,228	2.4	100.0
Two races	6,368,075	2.3	93.3
Three races	410,285	0.1	6.0
Four races	38,408	-	0.6
Five races	8,637	-	0.1
Six races	823	-	-
-Percentage rounds to 0.0.
X Not applicable.
SOURCE: Nicholas A. Jones and Amy Symens Smith, "Table 1. Total Population by Number of Races Reported: 2000," in The Two or More Races Population: 2000, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC, November 2001

2002), in 2000 the birthrate for non-Hispanic African-American teenagers ages fifteen to seventeen was fifty-two births per 1,000 women. This was more than three times the rate for non-Hispanic white teens—15.8 per 1,000 women. Hispanics in the same age group had the highest birthrate, at sixty births per 1,000 women. Asians and Pacific Islanders had the lowest rate, at 11.5 births per 1,000 women, while Native Americans had a birthrate of 39.6 births per 1,000 women. All of the teen birthrates were down from 1999, when the rate for ages fifteen to seventeen for African-Americans was 53.7; for whites, 17.1; for Hispanics, 61.3; for APIs, 12.3; and for Native Americans, 41.4. (See Table 2.5.)

The trend reverses among Hispanic and American Indian women eighteen to nineteen years of age, as birthrates in this age group rose from 1999 to 2000. Hispanic females ages eighteen to nineteen in 2000 had a birthrate of 143.6 births per 1,000 women, compared to 139.4 births per 1,000 women in 1999. American Indian women's birth rates in that age range went from 110.6 in 1999 to 113.1 in 2000. Among non-Hispanic African-American females ages eighteen to nineteen, the birthrate was 125.1 births per 1,000 women in 2000, down from 126.8 per 1,000 women. These groups were more than twice as likely to have a baby as non-Hispanic white women of the same age—that rate was 56.8 per 1,000 in 2000, down from 58.9 per 1,000 in 1999. API teens in the same age group had the lowest birthrates: thirty-seven births per 1,000 women in 2000, down from thirty-eight per 1,000 women in 1999. Though Native Americans ages eighteen to nineteen generally had higher birthrates than white teens, with 113.1 births per 1,000 eighteen-to nineteen-year-olds in 2000, they had lower birthrates than their non-Hispanic African-American counterparts. (See Table 2.5.)