The History of Teenage Childbearing as a Social Problem

ACENTURY FROM NOW, social and demographic historians may be pondering the question of why the topic of teenage childbearing suddenly became so prominent in America during the last several decades of the twentieth century. The issue emerged from social invisibility during the 1950s and early 1960s, when rates of childbearing among teens reached historical peaks, and rose to a level of public obsession just as rates of teenage childbearing began to plummet in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1995, in his State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton singled out teenage childbearing as “our most serious social problem.” When he issued this bit of hyperbole, the overall rate of teenage childbearing was barely more than half of what it had been several decades earlier, and even the rate of nonmarital childbearing among teenagers had begun a decline that has continued for more than a decade (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2007; Ventura, Mathews, and Hamilton 2001). Clinton was not the first president to take note of the costs of early childbearing. Beginning with Jimmy Carter’s administration, every president since has put the issue high on his domestic agenda. Americans appear to agree with this emphasis. An advocacy group aimed at preventing teenage pregnancy, reporting on the results of a poll conducted in 1995, concluded that “the number one symptom of erosion in family cohesiveness is the spread of teenage pregnancy” (National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy 1997, 1). According to the poll, more people were troubled by teenage pregnancy than by the growth of nonmarital childbearing in the