Dollars and Sex (26 page)

It would be an oversimplification to say that Sarah vowed there and then to be celibate for the remainder of high school; learning often takes time. As it turned out, however, Sarah never found herself in a position of feeling that fulfilling her sexual desires was worth the risks it involved. Over time, she came to believe that hooking up was one more thing she could wait to look forward to in college.

Sarah lost track of Troy at some point in grade eleven, and the truth is he left school early. But she was reminded of him and his family the night that she attended her school prom. Her mother had dropped her and her two best friends off at the door (dates having seemed to be more trouble than they were worth). As they made their way to the “red carpet,” she saw that it was flanked on either side, not by paparazzi or even camera-wielding
parents, but by teenage women carrying babies on their hips. Many former classmates whose pregnancies had prevented them from staying in school (or at least from going to the prom) had showed up that night to see their friends arrive in their prom finery.

Sarah had, of course, known that quite a few of the girls in her class had become mothers in that final year, and, in fact, one girl was already expecting her second baby, but the stark contrast between shiny prom queens and yoga-pant-wearing moms made clear to her just how different their life paths really were.

You may have judged Sarah when she chose to have an abortion in college and you are free to do that, but you should know that she did not come to that decision lightly. She didn't have to guess how her life would change if she decided to continue with her pregnancy: she already knew.

EVERYONE, IT TURNS OUT, IS NOT DOING IT

Teenagers in the United States today are less sexually active than any other group of teenagers since the mid-1980s. According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2010 less than half of teenagers had ever had sexual intercourse (42 percent for men and 43 percent for women), compared with 51 percent of teenage women and 60 percent of teenage men just twenty-two years ago. Teens are also not simply substituting sexual intercourse with other sexual behaviors (like oral or anal sex); 46 percent of males and 49 percent of females between the ages of 15 and 17 have had no sexual contact with another person.

More than 92 percent of sexually active teenage men and 86 percent of teenage women reported that in their last act of sexual intercourse they used some form of birth control. Despite this apparent diligence, in the same year 367,752 babies were born to women between the ages of 15 and 19, meaning that almost 3.5 percent of women in this age group gave birth. While this rate has fallen by more than one-third from 1991 to 2010, the United States still has the highest teen birth rate in the developed world—more than double that of its neighbor Canada.

This is not because Canadian teens are significantly less sexually active either; according to Statistics Canada, 43 percent of Canadian teens between the ages of 15 and 19 have had sexual intercourse.

This decrease in teen birth is not the result of an increase in access to abortion. The teen abortion rate in the United States in 2006 was less than half of what it was in 1991 (sixteen per thousand women, compared with thirty-seven per thousand).

Public health researchers John Santelli and Andrea Melnikas have determined that the decline in teen birth rates between 1991 and 2005 was unrelated to the reduction in teen sexual activity or increased access to abortion but rather entirely attributable to teens becoming more careful with their contraceptive usage. This is likely because the type of teens who had reduced their sexual activity would have used contraceptives had they been sexually active. So, when those teens chose not to be sexually active that decision had no effect on pregnancy rates.

Teen sexual behavior, and outcomes, is also very much a race issue in the United States. White sexually active teenage women were more likely to have used the pill the last time they had sex than were black and Hispanic teenagers: 39 percent of white teenage women were on the pill, compared with 14 percent of black teenage women and 17 percent of Hispanic teenage women.

Black and Hispanic teenage women are more than twice as likely to give birth as white teenage women: 2.4 percent of white teenage women aged 15 to 19 gave birth in 2010, compared with 5.2 percent of black teenage women and 5.6 percent of Hispanic teenage women.

Not only are black and Hispanic teenage women more likely to become pregnant, but they are more likely to have several children before they turn 20. For example, black and Hispanic girls, combined, make up about 34 percent of the whole population of teenage women but 58 percent of the teenage women who had their first baby in 2009. We already knew they were overrepresented in that group having a teen pregnancy, but it is worth noting that they made up 66 percent of teenage
moms having their second child that year, 73 percent of teenage moms having their third, and 80 percent of teenage moms having four or more children.

Astonishingly, 1,316 women in the United States between the ages of 15 and 19 gave birth to their fourth child or higher in 2009.

Part of the explanation for why birth rates vary between the races is due to differing attitudes toward teen pregnancy. For example, in response to the question: “If you got pregnant now, how would you feel?” only 8 percent of white teenage women said they would be either a little or very pleased, compared with 19 percent of Hispanic teenage women and 20 percent of black teenage women.

Finally, young women are the most likely group to contract a sexually transmitted disease; the Centers for Disease Control estimate that youths between the ages of 15 and 24 represent only 25 percent of the sexually experienced population, and yet nearly half of all new sexually transmitted diseases are acquired by people in that age group. They are four times more likely to have either chlamydia or gonorrhea and twice as likely to have syphilis than the general population.

Again, black teenage women are overrepresented in the group of women who are infected with a sexually transmitted disease. In 2009, they were sixteen times more likely to have contracted chlamydia, seven times more likely to have contracted gonorrhea, and twenty-eight times more likely to have contracted syphilis than white teenage women.

This empirical evidence suggests that while teen sexuality and pregnancy are on the decline, infections with sexually transmitted diseases among teens are not. That seems counterintuitive, but there is an economic explanation as to why that is the case.

And while teen sexuality is changing in positive ways within some socioeconomic groups, there are others in which teenagers are paying a high cost for being sexually active. That suggests that teen sexuality is better understood when we recognize that teenagers are responding to the changing economic environment in which we all live.

INEQUALITY CREATES A CULTURE OF DESPAIR

One of the things you might have noticed about Sarah's school is that it was attended by youth who came from different socioeconomic backgrounds. In fact, the school drew its students predominantly from two very distinct neighborhoods: a neighborhood where the residents are affluent and well educated and a neighborhood where the residents live in public housing and many live on social assistance: “the pubs.”

The second thing you might have noticed was that the teen pregnancy rate was very high. With maybe two hundred students in her graduating class, there should have been no more than eight girls giving birth, and yet judging by how many came to see their friends enter the prom, the rate at that school was actually much higher.

A paper by economists Melissa Schettini Kearney and Phillip Levine provides some interesting evidence as to why the teen pregnancy rate at Sarah's school was so high; they would argue that the diversity of economic backgrounds of the students in the school has played an important role.

One of the interesting features of the United States is that we observe big differences in teen pregnancy rates from one state to the next. These researches take advantage of that state-by-state variation to see what role income inequality has played in promoting teen pregnancy rates. They argue that a “culture of despair” has developed among the less-advantaged residents in states that have very high levels of income inequality. This culture reduces the perceived cost to teenagers of having a baby during high school, since those girls giving birth assume, probably correctly, they will never be able to rise above their current circumstance regardless of whether or not they become a teenage mother.

When we think of culture, we often think that because it is external to us as individuals, that it is somehow external to the world around us as well; it is something we inherit like brown eyes or ugly feet. Economists think of culture as being
endogenous
—determined internally within a given society by the economic environment of that society. Yes, we inherit our culture, but that is in part because we inherit the economic environment. If that economic environment changes, then the culture of that society will change as well.

So, inequality creates a culture among poorer families that their economic condition is inevitable and unchangeable.

The empirical evidence finds that teenage women from low socioeconomic homes who live in low-income-inequality states are less likely, by 5 percentage points, to give birth by age 20 than are similar women living in high-income-inequality states.

It also suggest that those same women are more likely, by 4 percentage points, to terminate a pregnancy when they live in low-income-inequality states compared with when they live in a high-income-inequality state.

So, the big difference in teen birth rates between low- and highincome-inequality states is not that teenage women are significantly less likely to become pregnant but rather that they are more likely to have an abortion once they have become pregnant.