The numbers of teenagers giving birth has fallen drastically in the United States over the past three decades. But as Republican politicians move to strip away women’s rights, they put this great achievement at risk.
Giving birth while a teenager is generally disastrous for both the mother and child, often creating a low-income, single-parent family trapped in cyclical poverty.
But the numbers of teens giving birth in the U.S. have declined by 75 per cent since 1991, to 15 births per 1,000 women in 2020. That number was 8-per-cent lower than the year before. (In Canada, during that same period, it declined by 78 per cent.)
We can thank improved sex education, readily available contraception, and growing confidence and autonomy among young women – across racial groups – for this drop.
The decline in teenage motherhood mirrors an overall decline in the fertility rate. Woman are choosing to have their first child later in life, in order to complete their education and establish their careers.
This is a huge advance for the rights of women. Yet in parts of the U.S., this advance is at risk.
In the nine months since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, which protected a woman’s right to an abortion, 13 states have enacted laws banning abortions, with another dozen or so expected to join them, once court challenges are resolved.
In some states, Republican politicians are pressing to criminalize crossing a state line to receive an abortion. Wyoming has made it a crime to take an abortion pill. Other states are likely to follow. The U.S. is cleaving into two solitudes over abortion rights.
Sex education is also under assault. Many red states have traditionally had sex-ed curricula that encourage abstinence, discourage teaching on birth control, and limit discussion of LGBTQ issues.
But as Republicans and Democrats devolve from political parties into warring tribes, sex-ed is increasingly turning into a front line of the culture war.
Governor Ron “Don’t Say Gay” DeSantis moved this month to expand a ban on discussing LGBTQ issues in early grades to include all grades. But things are about to go much further.
A new Florida legislation known as House Bill 1069 would limit sex education before the sixth grade, reject the reality of transgender, and require the curriculum to promote “the benefits of monogamous heterosexual marriage.”
The bill has been dubbed the “Don’t Say Period” law, because girls could not be taught about menstrual cycles before the sixth grade. If passed unamended, education in the state would revert to a level not seen in many jurisdictions since the 1950s.
The Florida legislation “is part of a larger movement gaining speed in the U.S., and other parts of the world, that is seeking to roll back equal human rights of women and persons with diverse sexual orientations and gender identities,” wrote Meghan Campbell, a law lecturer at England’s University of Birmingham. “Its central aim is to advance an exceptionally narrow vision of gender and sexuality which restricts these facets of life to monogamous heterosexual marriages.”
According to a recent report by the Public Religion Research Institute, white evangelical Protestants have experienced a “precipitous drop” as a share of the American population, shrinking from 23 per cent in 2006 to 14 per cent in 2020. White Christians overall have gone from being about two-thirds of the American population in the 1990s to just over 40 per cent today.
As they lose influence, conservative whites in those states where they remain the largest voting block – generally in the South and Plains states – lash out in an effort to preserve their cultural dominance, attacking the rights of women, racial minorities, and sexual and gender minorities.
This means that more teenage girls, lacking access to proper sex education and birth control, are at risk of becoming mothers.
That anyone would accept increased poverty and misery among young people as a price worth paying to win a culture war with the left is a mystery. Let this be one aspect of American political culture that Canada never imports.