"Estimates from the June 2002 CPS indicate that approximately 1.3 million women gave birth out of wedlock in the 12-month period preceding the survey, representing 33 percent of all births during this period.

...In 2002, 89 percent of births to teenagers were out of wedlock, compared with 50 percent of births to women in their early twenties."

(Source: Barbara Downs, "Fertility of American Women: June 2002," Current Population Reports P20-548, The United States Census Bureau, October 2003; http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/p20-548.pdf.)  

"'Twas the night before the Christmas dance and all through the school
Many teenagers thinking how "sex can be cool"
The girls getting ready, pretty dresses all bought
Makeup, new hairdos, were not for naught

The girls were dreaming of romance and bliss
But, some guys were thinking, "surely I'll not miss"
Parents of young ladies hadn't thought to have told
That "boys can be boys", whether young or old

And out in the media there arose such a clatter
"Sex can be safe, use a condom, it don't matter."
So many fell victim to the lies, not the truth
Not realizing that now is the time to enjoy youth"

[Editor's Note:  Please visit our friends at Abstinence Clearinghouse (www.abstinence.net) for the full text of this poem.  -Karl John Shields]

(Source: Michelle Lee, "'Twas the Night Before the Christmas Dance," Positive Approach to Teen Health (PATH, Inc), Valparaiso, Indiana; quoted at Abstinence Clearinghouse, November 18, 2003; http://www.abstinence.net/library/index.php?entryid=624.) 

Since at least the Sixties, education and welfare officials have anguished about the number of teen mothers in America. Much of this anxiety has been misplaced. So suggests sociologist Ruth N. Lopez Turley of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in a study recently published in Child Development.

Probing nationally representative data collected between 1986 and 1998 for children ages three to sixteen, Turley discovered that indeed children of a teenage mother typically did score lower on tests of cognitive ability and did engage in more troublesome behaviors than did the children born to an older mother. However, by using data for children born to mothers' sisters to establish a baseline for comparison, Turley was able to demonstrate that the problematic outcomes observed in the average teenage mother's children were "not due to the mother's age at birth but to her disadvantaged family background."

In the sophisticated statistical model Turley deploys, "the effect of maternal age is small (close to zero) and statistically insignificant for all three [cognitive] test scores and behavior problems." Quite simply, "maternal age per se does not explain children's outcomes." In contrast, Turley stresses the statistical reliability of "postbirth family characteristics" - including "the presence of a spouse" - in predicting children's cognitive and behavioral trajectories. "In other words," Turley concludes, "instead of focusing on maternal age, the focus should be on maternal family background." In particular, she suggests that a young woman's early "experiences such as divorce or poverty" count for more than the age at which she first bears a child in determining whether her children will lag in their cognitive development or will develop disruptive behavior patterns.

(Source: Ruth N. Lopez Turley, "Are Children of Young Mothers Disadvantaged Because of Their Mother's Age or Family Background?" Child Development 74[2003]: 465-474.)