Asymmetrical Information

I wonder if the drop in teen pregnancies in the late 1990s is related to the availability of abortions in the 1970s and 1980s.

Babies that are aborted certainly don't grow up to be teen mothers.

Marshall:

It sounds like you've been reading Freakonomics. Actually, you could be on to something, but you'd have to assume that the aborted babies of the 1980s were more likely than the general population to have had kids as teenagers.

But Bill Clinton was the cause, he signed welfare reform in 1994. Probably too reality based to consider or admit.

Two 2004 papers from Heritage shed some light on the decline in abortions in the past decade:

Analyzing the Effects of State Legislation on the Incidence of Abortion During the 1990s by Michael New, Ph.D.

Pro-Life Policy: Does It Make a Difference? by Andrew Grossman

In short, there is a major policy dimension --apart from welfare reform and economic growth--that many seem to overlook.

Paul,

Welfare reform doesn't quite explain why there were fewer pregnancies, only why there might be fewer births.

(From the post:) I like

[i]n the 1950s and 1960s, a larger number of pregnant teens married;

I imagine that in the 1950s and 1960s, a significant number of teens were married before they were pregnant; and I don't see a young marriage with a child as necessarily a disaster.

It was the first time in half a century that the actual number of pregnancies declined by a significant amount, rather than just a change in the outcome of the pregnancies.

Well, fewer pregnancies is a good thing, right? Doesn't matter whether they're born to married women, or single women, or aborted; it's an "achievement" any way you slice it.

Honestly, this is grotesque.

I think it's AIDS.

During the 90s, condoms became less stigmatized and more socially acceptable, even among teens, because of the massive campaign of public education that sought to slow the spread of AIDS and other STDs.

If you're not getting AIDS, you're not getting pregnant either.

I don't think it's got anything to do with President Clinton directly. I think the same public-health changes would have happened under any presidency.

I am not exactly sure what he credits Clinton with doing exactly.
"I don't fully credit Bill Clinton with the achievement, any more than you can credit any president with economic growth or another change that depends on a million private choices."

In other words Clinton may or may not have had something to do with it. He's hardly positing that Bill Clinton had anything to do with it. He happened to be president when it happened. I suspect welform reform, plus AIDS, plus a hugeely booming economy (which raises the opportunity cost of having kids), along with concerted efforts by conservative groups to reduce the number of out of wedlock births and teenage pregnancies through education.

Of course it was Clinton. Sex was in the news and treated as something ridiculous. Adolescents are resistant to sermons and sensitive to ridicule. If we want the decline to continue we want a President whose sex life will be the butt of even more jokes than Clinton's.

That's why I'm starting the Michael Jackson for President campaign.

I'm with Mr. Harrell -- it was AIDS. The risks of sex escalated from pregnancy (w/ many solutions) and old-style STD's (either curable or somewhat treatable) to a painful, lingering death. I don't know if this did much lower the rate of sexual participation, but I do suspect it did increase condom usage. Does anyone have statistics on condom sales over these years? I would think they went up appreciably.

I have to put my $2 bet on the widespread availability of easily managed contraception. In the late 1980's, condoms were easily acquired. Pop culture from before this period leads me to believe that cohorts older than my born-in-1973 self had much more stressful experiences when attempting to secure contraceptives. Giving '80s and '90s kids enough condoms that we had enough to make risque balloons out of some of them meant that unplanned sex didn't mean unplanned pregnancy as often.

Of course, if the availability/stress gap is not a cohort gap but a reality/dramatic entertainment gap, then my theory goes down the toilet.

Anyone have numbers on annual condom distribution? (I would say sales figures, but there were some giveaways. Even in the height of the AIDS epidemic in a gifted school in Manhattan run pretty much by standards set by hippies, we didn't go pick up condoms at the school nurse's. We went to anonymous drugstores and paid money.)

Andrew Grossman -- I read your references and I found it interesting that the studies found that pro-life policies at the state level caused a change in abortions. But those studies did not incorporate the drop in the number of pregencies into their data.

Makes me question how unbiased those studies were.

Everyone crediting AIDS or condom availability for this is working on another timetable. John Bragg, for example:

I have to put my $2 bet on the widespread availability of easily managed contraception. In the late 1980's, condoms were easily acquired.

Yes, they were. Also, AIDS was a major scare by then; that's just about when the death rate peaked.

So why does this result in a reduction in pregnancies ten years later, when AIDS (for better or worse) isn't seen as nearly as much of a threat here, and when the same condoms have been in the same supermarket aisles for a decade (or, frankly, two or three in many places)? I mean, I've heard of prolonged gestations, but not so prolonged as that.

I don't know the answer to that.

It's certainly plausible that mothers who wouldn't have abortions are more likely to raise children who won't have abortions that are mothers who would have abortions.

The other thing, of course, is that I'm absolutely convinced this trend has absolutely nothing to do with the "increasing dominance of right-wing theocrat Jesus freaks," as the TPM folks would remind us. Nope, nothing at all.

I also note that, in my very limited correspondence with Joshua Micah Marshall, he is a snarky, arrogantly ignorant twit who condescends to people who objects to his proclamations and ignores them if they present facts he doesn't like. It would be a little excusable if he weren't such an atrocious writer who takes the "journalistic style" to parodic extremes. Everything he writes follows the basic formula, "So . . . . Now . . . . But . . . . And . . . ." Apparently, the man never learned about sentence fragments in grade school and never figured out that one-fragment paragraphs stop being cool once you finish your first year on the high school newspaper.

I bet its an accounting gimmick. Maybe we started counting pro forma pregnancies in the late 1990s.

So, uhh, you're being 'snarky' in response to a blog post that, ummm, doesn't claim that Clinton was responsible for the decline in teen pregnancies in the 90s. Ok, I see, I guess.

Just kind of sad really.

Jeff Harrell: AIDS is the first thing I thought of, too, but the timing is off. The worst of the AIDS epidemic in the US was over before the teen pregnancies declined.

OTOH, maybe there was a delayed reaction to AIDS. From 1945 to nearly 1980, STD's were perceived as treatable by a shot of penicillin, so (aside from emotional turmoil) the worst that could happen from sex was pregnancy, and eventually there was a legal and fairly safe medical procedure for that, too. I was born in 1953; if asked to think about the possibility of dying from casual sex, I'd probably think about being stalked by an insane Glenn Close before thinking about AIDS. When someone born about 1970 heard about AIDS, he or she was already a teenager, and might not have paid too much attention to anything contradicting the hormonal messages. Kids born in the 1980's learned in elementary school that sex could lead to death - so cautionary messages were ingrained before their hormones started surging.

"I don't fully credit Bill Clinton with the achievement, any more than you can credit any president with economic growth or another change that depends on a million private choices. But there were policies and, more importantly, cultural changes, that had something to do with it." [emphasis mine]

If the emphasized portions don't attempt to make a case for Clinton's at-least-partial responsibility for the decline in abortions, what do they do?

At the great risk of both bringing down the level of discussion and referring to VRWC talking points, how's about the type of sexual activity? Does Clinton deserve any credit for changing that?

C'mon.

"Reality-based community" is itself a snark against the Bush II administration. It was used perjoritavely by a senior Bush advisor: http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/10/con04443.html TPM (and atrios, and deLong, and kos, and kleiman and...) use(d) it as a snarky attempt to coopt the other side's spin. It is not in and of itself arrogant.

We on the left (if I may) see the 90's as a very successful ride on the Democrat machine, even though we spent much of that time worried about Republican congressional power grabs and grinding our teeth over Clinton's corporatist moderatisms (NAFTA!!) So while it's silly to credit Clinton some personal credit for drops in teen pregnancies, it's not silly to credit Clinton with being the party host who gave liberalism a better seat at the table than it had gotten for 12 years prior. And when your politicos had to seriously listen to those crazy condom-distributing, pamphlet-waving, public-education-happy liberals...well, looky here, America didn't dissolve into an amoral mass of atheistic chaos!

Ms. Galt: should the government give money to abstainance-only education programs? And if it does and teen pregnancies become more common, will you absolve Bush II of the blame?

Crediting Bill Clinton for the decline in pregnancies can be embraced by both liberals and conservatives.

Don't believe me? Watch what happens whenever someone posts a "13 year olds having oral sex" newspaper story on Free Republic. Without fail, lots of commenters will attribute this to "Bill Clinton's legacy" because he singlehandedly convinced kids that oral sex wasn't sex. (As all of us who went to day camp in the pre-Clinton period know, "oral sex" used to mean "talking about sex" before Clinton changed the meaning.) There are many, many people who attribute this cultural shift to President Clinton. Doesn't this follow automatically?

Joshua Micah Marshall... is a snarky, arrogantly ignorant twit

Interesting. I have to wonder if he has any idea who you are.

...but the posters on Free Republic would agree with the comments about TPM being snarky and JM knows who they are because they got a seat at the table when Clinton had oral sex and...

...oops, I just lost my "No True Propter Hoc" fallacy in a closed recursive loop of identity politics.

Maybe Clinton's contribution was in making it more acceptable among teen males to settle for only getting oral sex?

Interesting. I have to wonder if he has any idea who you are.

Would it matter if he did? Heck, half the posts on TPM are Josh Marshall making snarky remarks about people who neither know nor care that he exists. It isn't like the man is the next Dan Rather or something -- he just hosts a modestly successful political blog.

Maybe Clinton's contribution was in making it more acceptable among teen males to settle for only getting oral sex?
Pretty much what I was thinking.
Teen boys want sex. They will do whatever they can to get it. In the 90s oral sex became much more socially acceptable. I remember some polls recently that show that teens don't think of it as 'sex'.
So now, teen boys get some oral sex and they aren't pressuring teen girls to 'put out' so fewer girls are getting pregnant.

Violent crime rates in the United States have been declining for more than a decade. Ask anyone involved in law enforcement who pays attention and they'll tell you that there are many reasons for this, but the biggest has got to be demographics. The people making up the huge population bubble called the Baby Boomers are aging. This means that those who find violence an acceptable way to do business have either removed themselves from the equation (through trying to shoot it out with the police or by earning lifetime jail sentences), or are getting old and wise enough to reconsider their methods.

So, making the big assumption that his figures are right, we have this guy at TPM Cafe talking about the total number of teen pregnancies over a period of decades. And he attributes a drop in the number (not the rate, but the actual number) to Clinton. The author does this without once wondering how many teens were available to become pregnant during this drop, and if the number was lower than during pre-Clinton administrations.

I dunno, guys. It seems to me that this should be pretty basic stuff. It seems to me to be kinda dopey to assign credit for a social good without first finding this out.

James

"It sounds like you've been reading Freakonomics. Actually, you could be on to something, but you'd have to assume that the aborted babies of the 1980s were more likely than the general population to have had kids as teenagers. "

I had the very same idea. I even sent it off to Steve Levitt at Freakonomics and he responded that it was a worthwhile question....how we could measure it, though, is very hard to see.

Jeff Harrell: AIDS is the first thing I thought of, too, but the timing is off. The worst of the AIDS epidemic in the US was over before the teen pregnancies declined.

There's been a huge number of reports about oral sex becomming more common and accepted by teens and others in the 90's. Some attributed this to Clinton but I suspect AIDS had a lot to do with it. Oral sex is perceived to be less risky for good reason but possibly more enjoyable than sex with a condom.

Also don't put too much stock in the timing issue. People often over estimate the chance of horrible things happening to them. They worry more about being in an airplane crash than a car crash. When AIDS was peaking it was also perceived as a gay community problem and there was resistence to serious AIDS education in the schools. By the 90's AIDS is mentioned in the media as a straight problem much more even if statistically that may be unjustified. Hence teens in the 90's and 00's may worry about AIDS more than teens in the late 80's and early 90's did even though they should have.

I noticed that Jane's citation only concentrated on raw numbers 'about 1 million pregnancies' yet the number of teens has hardly been constant! How about the pregnancy rate among teens?

Of course it was Clinton. Sex was in the news and treated as something ridiculous. Adolescents are resistant to sermons and sensitive to ridicule. If we want the decline to continue we want a President whose sex life will be the butt of even more jokes than Clinton's.

Ahhh yes, the media didn't discover that sex stories sell until the mid-90's! Until then they were just running reports on the Laffer curve during sweeps week!

Violent crime rates in the United States have been declining for more than a decade. Ask anyone involved in law enforcement who pays attention and they'll tell you that there are many reasons for this, but the biggest has got to be demographics

James, you have to read Freakonomics which goes into this in detail. Demographically there should have been a spike in crime in the mid-90's. As Levitt noted, there was a lot of hand wringing over the prospect of a new generation of 'super predators' about to hit the streets from middle schools. What happened wasn't just that there were fewer teens but that the teens were as a whole less inclined to crime than previous generations of teens.

I realize this thread is basically dead, but to set the record straight:

Commenter Spencer writes above that he read the Heritage papers linked further above and wondered why we did not include in our models the "number of pregnancies." He insinuates that, because of this omission, our papers are biased.

Well, we did actually include such a variable. From the Michael New paper:

"Finally, a fertility variable, measuring the number of births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44, is included in the model."

Hahaha, he's now a caricature:

"Now, I'm away from my office. And it's the holiday weekend, so I can't get an expert on the phone to confirm that recollection. So leave that as a contingent assertion. If it turns out I've misrecollected this I'll let you know in a subsequent post. But I think I remember it correctly."

Sounds typical for the TPM crowd: Start with faulty data based upon recollection ("...in the late 1990s, something totally unprecedented occured: the actual number of teen pregnancies declined sharply") and draw a faulty, if partial, conclusion ("I don't fully credit Bill Clinton with the achievement...").

The decline in teen pregnancies didn't start "in the late 1990s," so neither Clinton nor welfare reform can be credited with initiating the trend.

Per Table 1 of "U.S. Teenage Pregnancy Statistics
Overall Trends, Trends by Race and Ethnicity
And State-by-State Information," The Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI), Updated February 19, 2004, 632kb PDF, teen pregnancies peaked in 1990 at 116.9/1000.

Year TPR Chg %
1986 106.7
1987 106.6 -0.09%
1988 111.4 +4.50%
1989 114.9 +3.14%
1990 116.9 +1.74%
1991 115.3 -1.37%
1992 111.0 -3.73%
1993 108.0 -2.70% Jan-Clinton takes office
1994 104.6 -3.15%
1995 99.6 -4.78%
1996 95.6 -4.02% Aug-Welfare reform enacted
1997 91.4 -4.39%
1998 88.7 -2.95%
1999 85.7 -3.38%
2000 83.6 -2.45%

This AGI page, revised 9/1999, reporting data through 1996, says, "Steep decreases in the pregnancy rate among sexually experienced teenagers accounted for most of the drop in the overall teenage pregnancy rate in the early-to-mid 1990s. While 20% of the decline is because of decreased sexual activity, 80% is due to more effective contraceptive practice."

When you get the trend correct, it makes the fear of HIV/AIDs hypothesis much more likely.

It was November 8, 1991, when Magic Johnson announced he was HIV-positive, saying, "I think sometimes we think, well, only gay people can get it--'It's not going to happen to me.' And I'm here saying that it can happen to anybody, even me, Magic Johnson."

"...[Johnson's] forthright disclosure was hailed as a turning point in AIDS awareness. He was the first major celebrity to have contracted HIV through heterosexual sex, and his disclosure helped shatter the misconception that it could be contracted only through homosexual sex."

Good job, Lynxx. I don't know why anyone would hire that jackass to mow the lawn, let alone write something.

The data you provided also show that the decline in the teen pregnancy rate began around the same time the crime rate began falling.

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