Charts are keyboard readable: focus a chart, then use the left and right arrow keys to step one reading at a time, hold Shift to step a year (ten readings on a yearly chart), Home and End for the first and last month, Escape to let go. In the timeline, tab to Window Start or Window End and use the arrow keys to move it.
Teen Birth Rate
About This Indicator
What Is the Teen Birth Rate?
Births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 19, from the National Center for Health Statistics, since 1940. Most of the mothers are 18 or 19.
Why Does It Matter?
Teen births are linked to less schooling and lower earnings for mothers and their children, though a link alone cannot say whether the birth or the hardship around it came first.
Can Politics Influence It?
Sex education, contraception, and family planning programs such as Title X reach it. Its long fall after 1991 came under presidents of both parties.
Key Idea
Teens had babies at a far higher rate in the 1950s than in 1991, yet teen births became a national worry only in the 1970s. Most 1950s teen mothers were married; what changed was not how often teens had babies, which was falling, but whether they married first.
Scored: A Faster Fall or Slower Rise Ranks Better
Source: CDC National Center for Health Statistics. data.cdc.gov yt7u-eiyg before 2016 and daba-4vfq from 2016; Births: Provisional Data, Table 1, for any newer year.
Loading the dataset…