Modified: 04/07/2006

New Mexico’s High Rate of Teen Births Linked to State’s Poverty

by Sara Beth Koplik, Ph.D.
Kids Count Program Manager, New Mexico Voices for Children

America has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the entire industrialized world—and while most Americans would consider that a moral failure, not everyone agrees on which of our moral values we’ve lost. Do American teens have more children than, say, Swedish teens because they are more promiscuous? Well, no, actually. We’ve failed our young people on an entirely different moral level. We’ve allowed one of our nation’s core moral values—that hard work leads to prosperity—to die.
The percentage of births to teenagers is actually dropping in America, and New Mexico mirrors that nationwide downward trend. While that’s good news, the bad news is that New Mexico ranks dead last among the 50 states in teen births, according to a study released last week by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Aside from the fact that few teens have the emotional maturity to handle parenthood, births to teen mothers tend to have poorer outcomes than births to women in their 20s and 30s. So it’s not too surprising that New Mexico also ranks at or near the bottom in the report on a variety of birth outcomes, among them: pre-term births, low birth weights, and the percentage of women getting late or no prenatal care
Nationwide, the percentage of women getting late or no prenatal care is dropping, but in New Mexico it is on the rise. Over the past decade New Mexico has had twice—sometime triple—the national average for women who get late or no prenatal care.
For years, the paradigm has been that teens get pregnant then drop out of school. With special programs and schools such as New Futures we’ve done a good job of keeping pregnant teens in high school. The trend now is that teens drop out of high school and then become pregnant. One of the major players in this teen pregnancy equation is poverty. It’s common sense that children born to teens are more likely to grow up in poverty than children born to women who put off starting a family until they gain more education or financial security. What’s not so obvious is that poverty is one of the main factors in whether children are born to teens to begin with.
As Beth Shulman points out in her excellent book, The Betrayal of Work, young women who believe they can attain (or maintain) a middle-class lifestyle have a very real incentive to put off child-bearing. Young women who live in poverty are more likely to believe that a middle-class lifestyle is out of their reach. Lacking this incentive—or, indeed, living with the belief that the future holds nothing but life-long poverty no matter what choices they make—young women actually see having children as a way to create a future for themselves.
The part of the futuristic picture teens don’t see is the sad reality that their children are not likely to do much better than they did themselves. According to the New Mexico Teen Pregnancy Coalition, children born to teens are more likely to be physically abused, neglected or abandoned, do poorly in school, do time in jail, and become teen parents themselves.
So what is the solution to teen pregnancy and poor birth outcomes? There’s a long list of things that have proven successful in reducing teen pregnancy: access to appropriate and affordable health care, access to birth control, comprehensive education about sexuality, and a strong line of communication with parents, are but a few.
Perhaps the best way to eliminate teen pregnancy would be to eliminate what’s come to be called the “working poor.” No one who lives in the wealthiest country in the world and works a 40-hour week should live in poverty. But as costs have risen with inflation, paychecks for the lowest wage earners have remained static. A child whose parents work minimum-wage jobs, but still struggle to make the rent and must rely on food stamps in order to feed the family, has little incentive to follow in their footsteps.
America once had, as a core moral value, the sense that with a little hard work, anyone could achieve the American dream. But too many years of trickle-down economics have made that dream unattainable for those in the so-called ‘entry level’ jobs. The prevailing belief may be that a rising tide lifts all boats—but you’ve got to have a boat. America’s working poor have been treading water for far too long. As this report, among others, shows, it is always the children who end up in deep water.