Demographer Kay S. Hymowitz
writes for
RealClearPolicy about the class gap in unplanned babies. She identifies the basic question in her opening sentence:
Are the poor victims of an unjust economy or of self-destructive cultural norms?
Then she summarizes the research findings:
Despite their hardship, disadvantaged women still have far more abortions than better-off women; poor and low-income women get close to 70 percent of all abortions.
Affluent women are more likely to terminate a particular unplanned pregnancy, but because poor women become pregnant at far higher rates, they have more abortions overall. Moreover, about half of all women getting abortions have had at least one previously; many if not most of them are low income.
Fertility rates declined across the board between 2008 and 2011, but they dropped markedly more among high-school dropouts, who are generally the poorest of the poor. The least educated women experienced a dramatic 17 percent drop in fertility. That's compared to 1 percent among women with a BA or more. Note also that between the recessionary years of 2008 and 2011, the abortion rate declined 13 percent. In this case, poor women were able to avoid pregnancies because of hardship, not in spite of it. This is precisely the opposite of what the structural theory would predict.
Hymowitz cites a study:
"Since unintended childbearing is associated with higher rates of poverty," the Brookings authors write, "less family stability, and worse outcomes for children, these gaps further entrench inequality ... to close the gaps, we must first understand them."
About the need to understand unplanned pregnancy, she concludes:
They're right. But we’ll need to move beyond economic theories to do that.
Hymowitz sees class-based cultural differences at work, more so than poverty.
