Teen pregnancy: government programs are not the cause

Rebecca Blank

Feminist Economics, 1995, vol. 1, issue 2, 47-58

Abstract: Public assistance payments have been blamed for increases in out-ofwedlock birth rates among teenagers and other women. The data indicate that rising nonmarital birth rates are primarily caused by a decline in fertility among married women, combined with a growing share of unmarried women in the population. Existing research suggests that these changes have not been driven by public assistance payments; instead they are related to economic and social changes affecting women of all income levels. While hard to predict the effect of eliminating public assistance for teen mothers, it is likely that many teen pregnancies will continue to occur. Other ways to address this problem are discussed at the end of the paper.

Keywords: Poverty; teen pregnancy; welfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1995
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/714042231 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:femeco:v:1:y:1995:i:2:p:47-58

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RFEC20

DOI: 10.1080/714042231

Access Statistics for this article

Feminist Economics is currently edited by Diana Strassmann

More articles in Feminist Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().