Oh, Baby! Why Choose Life of Poverty?

The Missoulian | Editorial

Sunday 03 December 2006

All moralizing aside, consider the economics of childbirth trend.

One in three American teens get no formal education about birth control, the Guttmacher Institute, a sex and reproductive health research organization, lamented the other day.

Make of that what you will. A worse problem, however, may be that too few young people are getting formal education about basic economics.

Let us explain.

The national Centers for Disease Control on Nov. 21 issued a new report noting that births to unwed mothers increased to a record high last year.

Interestingly, births to teenage mothers fell to the lowest level on record. This, alone, is a significant societal triumph. Children having children once ranked high on the nation's list of social ills because few adolescents have enough experience and are emotionally and materially fit to successfully raise children - at least, not without generous contributions from others. While the American birthrate has remained fairly steady, the percentage of births to teens is down 35 percent since 1991, a year when teen childbirth hit its peak. The Guttmacher Institute's concerns about the inadequacy of sex education for teens notwithstanding, somehow American adolescents are figuring it out.

This cheery news is offset, almost incongruously, by a surge of childbearing among single women in their 20s. Nearly 37 percent of all children born in the United States were born to unmarried mothers. This trend is reflected among all women of childbearing age but is especially pronounced among twentysomethings. Almost half of the children born to women in their early 20s and about a third of those born to women in their late 20s have single moms.

Teen pregnancy plausibly has something to do with inadequacies in formal sex education, but surely by the time most people reach their 20s, they've figured it out, including the concept and techniques of birth control. That suggests the bulk of single women giving birth are more or less deciding to do so.

Who cares? People used to moralize about childbirth out of wedlock - OK, some still do - but, really, what good can it do to greet a new child into the world with a bunch of finger-wagging and tsk-tsking? Yet this is not a benign trend. Female-headed households are five times more likely to live in poverty, according to studies based on census data. The US Department of Agriculture recently reported that "food insecurity" - basically not always knowing where your next meal's coming from - plagues 30 percent of female-headed households, compared to 11 percent of all households. A number of sociologists and economists seem to agree that marriage is second behind quality of employment as a predictor of family poverty.

The statistics are pretty stark. According to the Census Bureau, 35 percent of single-mother families live in poverty. That compares with 20 percent of single-father families (which account for only one-sixth of single-parent families). The poverty rate for married couples with children is 7 percent.

None of this is particularly surprising. It takes a decent job to avoid poverty. It takes education or training or both to get a decent job. And it's generally harder to get an education and training and hold a decent job after you're otherwise occupied with the kids, especially if you're doing so on your own. It would be nice to think that cohabitation and child support payments could mitigate the economic consequences, but statistics don't bear that out. It would also be comforting to view childhood poverty as a temporary condition, but piles of research suggest impoverished children face greater risk than others of growing up to live and perpetuate lives of poverty as adults.

All of this is why the Bush administration and social conservatives have pushed government marriage-promotion programs. The Heritage Foundation says child poverty could be reduced by one-third if marriage if marriage rates among parents could be restored to the levels of the 1960s.

Well, if you ask us, it's not the government's job to tell you whether to get married. As the National Journal's Jonathan Rauch put it, "If federal marriage policy works as well as federal agricultural policy, we'll all have a problem." Nor, for that matter, is it a newspaper's role to advocate marriage. But we can speak to matters of economics. And the economic statistics are clear: The decision to have children outside marriage is a recipe for poverty, and the younger you are the greater the likelihood of poverty. Lots of people survive poverty and some grow up to be quite successful. But why would anyone choose that route? The welfare safety net exists to keep most poor families from living under bridges and maybe even help them to eventually crawl out of poverty. But why would anyone count on eventually escaping poverty when they might avoid it?

The declining birth rate among teens suggests young people are quite capable of making reproductive choices. Yet birth trends show a startling tendency for young adults to make economically disastrous choices. That suggests perhaps a need to arm young people with at least as much knowledge about basic economics as they're getting about sexuality.

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