Socioeconomic disadvantage and adolescent women's sexual and reproductive behavior: The case of five developed countries

Over the past two decades, policymakers in Europe have recognized the need to prepare young people for a labor market that is increasingly technology-driven and that requires education and training beyond the high school level.37 They now are paying even more attention to the challenge of improving education and training to better prepare young people for adulthood. While governments vary substantially in their approach and in the extent to which they support such programs,38 policymakers' expectation is that when young people have training and job opportunities, their transitions to adulthood are easier, and they are more likely to see the value of delaying parenthood. By contrast, rather than providing comprehensive choices that would motivate young people to delay childbearing, the U.S. government's recent efforts to reduce teenage pregnancy and childbearing include increasing funding for abstinence education and reducing benefits and support payments to mothers on welfare.39

Differences in government policies and programs to assist teenagers in making a smooth transition from school and college into the labor force probably make a difference in teenagers' motivation to delay pregnancy and childbearing and in their ability to plan for the future.40

Countries in Europe prioritize the need to reduce "social exclusion" as a means of reducing socioeconomic disadvantage. By contrast, in the United States, with its high levels of disadvantage, government programs to assist young people are less comprehensive and probably play a smaller role in redressing the imbalances in the life prospects of disadvantaged adolescents-the very imbalances that condition these adolescents' reproductive choices, decisions and behavior.

*In the early 1990s, rising unemployment resulted in higher levels of postponement of childbearing among low-income women than among employed or highly educated women, in large part because Swedish policy bases parental leave benefits on income in the year before a child's birth. The birthrate and early childbearing rates declined overall, and the declines were largest and most rapid among poor and less-educated women. (Sources: Landgren Moller E and Hoem B, Lowly educated women postpone childbearing, Vslfdrdsbullentinen Nr 2, SCB, Statistics Sweden, 1997 [in Swedish]; and Statistics Sweden, Childbearing and Female Employment: The Rise and Fall of Fertility in 1985-1997, SCB, Statistics Sweden, 1998:1 [in Swedish].)

^In the United States, differences across income levels are smaller for teenage pregnancy rates than for birthrates, primarily because higher-income adolescents who become pregnant are more likely than lower-income adolescents to have abortions. (Source: The Alan Guttmacher Institute [AGI], Sex and America's Teenagers, New York: AGI, 1994.)

*In France, other data show that 2% of adolescent women in academic programs had ever been pregnant, compared with 15% of adolescent women in vocational programs (source: Bajos N and Durand S, 2001, reference 38).