Rising Teen Birth Rates

More on the reported increase in teen birth rates, from the CDC, here.

"Between 2005 and 2006, the birth rate for girls 15 to 19 rose 3 percent, from 40.5 births per 1,000 in 2005 to 41.9 births per 1,000 in 2006. This comes after 14 years of declining rates. During that time, teen births dropped 34 percent from a peak of 61.8 births per 1,000 in 1991, according to the report.

The biggest increases for 2006 were among black teens, where the rate rose 5 percent, followed by 4 percent for American-Indian teens, 3 percent for white teens and 2 percent for Hispanic teens."

Interestingly, the fall in teen fertility is a curiousity in and of itself. I've seen several explanations - the rise in male (juvenile) incarceration has been posited by Amee Kamdar at the University of Chicago and Stephane Mechoulan and the University of Toronto in independent papers, with persuasive evidence. But I've also seen some compelling papers by Stephen Levitt, John Donahue and Grogger and Serkan Ozbeklik on the role of 1970s era legalized abortion. Their argument is an extension of the original Donahue-Levitt hypothesis, wherein legalizing abortion removed potential offenders, and in this case, potential teen fathers and mothers, and thus why teen fertility fell.

I probably believe the incarceration story much more than I believe the abortion legalization story, only because I've got one working paper on the abortion legalization story, and I think the evidence is fragile and mostly spurious correlations. At least, it does not explain the decline in gonorrhea rates that occur roughly coincidental to the decline in crime rates, which makes me more skeptical than I used to be towards the theory, in general.