Word: teens
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With disadvantage creating disadvantage, it is no wonder that teen pregnancy is widely viewed as the very hub of the U.S. poverty cycle. "A lot of the so-called feminization of poverty starts off with teenagers' having babies," says Lucile Dismukes of the Council on Maternal and Infant Health in Atlanta, a state advisory group. "So many can't rise above it to go back to school or get job skills...
...that have swept through American culture over the past 30 years. The teenage birth rate was actually higher in 1957 than it is today, but that was an era of early marriage, when nearly a quarter of 18-and 19-year-old females were wedded. The overwhelming majority of teen births in the '50s thus occurred in a connubial context, and mainly to girls 17 and over. Twenty and 30 years ago, if an unwed teenager should, heaven forbid, become pregnant, chances are her parents would see that she was swiftly married off in a shotgun wedding. Or, if marriage...
...does not choose to abort her pregnancy (and some 45% of teenagers do), chances are she will keep the baby and raise it without the traditional blessings of marriage. "The shotgun marriage is a relic of the past," observes Mark Testa, of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. With teen marriages two to three times as likely to end in divorce, he explains, "parents figure, why compound their mistake?" In 1950 fewer than 15% of teen births were illegitimate. By 1983 more than half were, and in some regions of the country, the figure exceeds 75%. Unwed motherhood has become...
...Planned Parenthood Federation. "While European societies have chosen to recognize sexual development as a normal part of human development, we have chosen to repress it. At the same time, we behave as if we're not repressing it." In studying various cultures, the Guttmacher researchers found that the highest teen-pregnancy rates were in countries with the least open attitudes toward sex. "The ambivalence our society is projecting about sex is costing us a lot," concludes Institute President Rosoff...
...pregnancies have reached epidemic proportions in some ghetto areas. According to Guttmacher statistics, black American teenagers have the highest fertility rate of any teenage population group in the entire world. (Israeli Arabs come in a distant second.) One in four black babies in the U.S. is born to a teen mother, most of them unwed. "In the black community, the phenomenon of teen marriage is almost gone," observes Mark Testa of NORC. "Eventually these girls get married, but it might be years later and not to the father of the child." Young black women under age 24 are facing...