by Dish Staff
Douthat contends that a “cultural consensus” is to thank for the decline in teen pregnancy, because “the idea that we should (and, just as importantly, can) reduce the teen birth rate unites just about every faction in American politics and culture”:
This possibility makes a case for being relatively optimistic that today’s trend will, in fact, persist, and that tomorrow’s teen birth rate could be lower still than today’s. At the same time, it leaves room for pessimism about whether our culture’s success in this area can be easily translated to the broader problem of adult out-of-wedlock births, adult family instability, and the cultural and socioeconomic problems associated with those trends. …
Delaying irresponsibility till adulthood makes it, well, less irresponsible, and not having a kid at 17 by itself suffices, for obvious reasons, to raise your chances of a stable family life, as does every delay thereafter. But to date, in the big picture, the strides we’ve made in reducing teenage pregnancy and births haven’t translated into a reversal of working and middle class family life’s slow disintegration; quite the opposite, in fact. Perhaps that will change; the out-of-wedlock birth rate finally stopped rising in the last couple of years, and it’s possible that the teenage birth rate’s recent decline will start to have major positive follow-on effects as today’s teenagers move through their life cycles. But for now, what’s happened with teen pregnancy is both a real and welcome success and one whose ripple effects have been more limited than we might have hoped.
The Dish 