PEDIATRICS Vol. 64 No. 3 September 1979, pp. 332
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TEENAGE PREGNANCY: WHY THE EPIDEMIC?

Kathleen Rudd Scharf

It is the age of the Pill, yet over a million American teenagers will get pregnant this year. About 600,000 of these young women will give birth . . . . In the 1950s, of course, contraception was illegal in many states even for married adults . . . . By the mid-1960s, contraceptive services were available to some resourceful adolescents, and residents of a few states could obtain reasonably inexpensive legal abortions—though the popular press still shied away from passing along information about either one. Court decisions in the 1970s have made contraception and abortion even more widely available. Now, about 400,000 teenage girls have abortions each year. But of the 600,000 teenagers who give birth, a staggering 94% keep their children. More than a third of these young mothers do not marry. Many are struggling with medical, social, and economic problems. The teenage pregnancy epidemic of the 1970s turns out to be more of a teenage baby-keeping epidemic.