Here is a classic problem of cause and effect. Teenagers who give birth are more likely to be from households with lower income levels. Also, teenagers who give tend to end up later in life in households with lower income levels. But does the lower income level cause teens to be more likely to give birth? Or does giving birth cause as a teen cause that woman to be more likely to end up in a lower-income household? How can one untangle cause and effect? Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine tackle these questions in "Why is the Teen Birth Rate in the United States So High and Why Does It Matter?" which appears in the Spring 2012 issue of my own Journal of Economic Perspectives. They have lots of interesting comments to make about variation in teen birthrates across states and countries. Here, I'll focus on their analysis of the cause and effect question, which surprised me and offers a nice example of how economist try to disentangle these sorts of issues.

"Our reading of the totality of evidence leads us to conclude that being on a low economic trajectory in life leads many teenage girls to have children while they are young and unmarried and that poor outcomes seen later in life (relative to teens who do not have children) are simply the continuation of the original low economic trajectory. That is, teen childbearing is explained by the low economic trajectory but is not an additional cause of later difficulties in life. Surprisingly, teen birth itself does not appear to have much direct economic consequence."

Conceptually, how would one tell whether giving birth as a teenager is a cause of lower future economic prospects?

Labels: adolescence, class, out-of-wedlock births, poverty, teenage pregnancy

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Miriam Jordan at The Wall Street Journal has published an investigative article about adoption from Ethiopia, which has for several years been riddled with allegations of fraud and unethical practices. This article tells the deceptively simple story of Melesech Roth, whose Ethiopian birthmother died of malaria, and whose birthfather (who lives in stone-age poverty) gave her up for adoption when someone came through his village, offering to take children to America who would later help support their families. The writing is so straightforward that you may not realize how extraordinary it is unless you've tried to write a similar piece. Persuading an adoptive family to talk with you on the record, and also finding the biological family and getting them to talk on the record, is a significant feat. ...

Here's the rule of thumb: If you can get a healthy infant or toddler within a year, don't adopt from that country. Adopt, instead, from American foster care, or from countries that send abroad very few children, and when they do, the children who are available are older, or disabled, or come in sibling groups, or otherwise have had trouble finding new local homes. Or if you're adopting for humanitarian reasons, donate that money an organization that helps children stay with their families, or brings clean water and mosquito nets and medicines to their villages.

It's far more rewarding to love an individual child than to give to anonymous foreigners. I know; I'm parenting an adopted child. But no one wants to be complicit, even unknowingly, in defrauding a father out of his daughter.

Labels: adoption, childhood, children, Ethiopia, Fathers, poverty

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If you’re sick of the sad, hopeless stories coming out of Africa, here’s one that made my year. New statistics show that the rate of child death across sub-Saharan Africa is not just in decline—but that decline has massively accelerated, just in the last few years. From the middle to the end of the last decade, rates of child mortality across the continent plummeted much faster than they ever had before.

These shocking new numbers are in a paper released today by Gabriel Demombynes and Karina Trommlerová in the Kenya office of the World Bank. Here are their figures for some of the recent changes in rates of child death across the continent. The numbers in the last column are the percent declines in child death rates every year over the past few years.

This is a stunningly rapid decline, and nothing like it was occurring even as recently as the first half of the decade.

Labels: Africa, childhood, children, health care, poverty

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Researchers have long tried to untangle the complicated mix of economics, culture, education and contraception (or lack thereof) that leads to teenage pregnancy.

Despite a decline in births to American teenage mothers over the past two decades, the United States stands out among developed nations in that its teenagers are much more likely to give birth than their peers in Canada, Germany, Norway, Russia (a country that is still advancing on the spectrum of development) or Switzerland.

A new study [pdf] by Melissa S. Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland, and Phillip B. Levine, an economist at Wellesley College, builds on their previous research [pdf] looking at the link between income inequality and rates of teenage childbirth.

It turns out the connection is quite striking.

In general, teenage childbirth is more common among poor girls. But poor girls who live in places with a high level of inequality — meaning that the ratio of income at the median of the income distribution to the income at the 10th percentile of the income distribution is higher than in other places — are even more likely to bear children as teenagers. ...

Inequality, the authors suggest, makes the poorest citizens believe that they have little chance of economic mobility. They are giving birth “at a young age instead of investing in their own economic progress because they feel they have little chance of advancement,” the authors write.

In fact, the authors point out that other research has shown that poor girls who have babies when they are teenagers do not suffer much worse economic outcomes in the long term than their peers who wait to have children. Teenage childbearing is “a symptom, not a cause” of poverty and economic immobility, Mr. Levine said in an interview.

Labels: adolescence, children, class, out-of-wedlock births, parenting, poverty, teenage pregnancy

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Unless you're a frequent reader of parenting blogs, you might not know there's a major divide in the world of children's playgrounds.

On the one side, you have the safety advocates who want lower structures, softer ground, and less opportunities for falling off or over, well, anything. On the other, those who worry that a safe playground is a boring playground that will do little to stimulate a child's imagination.

The debate can seem quite technical – should playgrounds have foam floors, or wood chips? What would be better for the 5-year-olds who tumble off the monkey bars? Should there even be monkey bars, or is that just asking for trouble? One mom was even banned from McDonald's after she was caught swabbing their play places in search of bacteria.

The debate has a very 21st century feel to it but it’s actually nothing new – these types of questions have been asked for at least a century. Below, a look at the history of playgrounds....

Labels: childhood, children, class, culture, parenting, poverty

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The "ugly secret of global poverty" is basically that men prioritize alcohol and tobacco over their children, per Nicholas Kristof's Sunday New York Times column. He addresses the problematic way in which many in the developing world choose to spend their money, though this is also true of some of the poor in the United States.

The call to action, that we should give women more control over finances and assets, is one that humanitarian workers have known for years. Aid and development workers learned quickly in the field that distributing food and rations to women in refugee camps for example, ensure that the goods benefit children.

However, a parallel and integrated solution would include focusing on mental health instead of isolating or banishing men, who also play an integral role in families. Men have various of reasons for drinking. Part of it could be cultural, and part of it simply selfish and hedonistic.

But poverty and mental health are interwoven. Some men drink to self-medicate their depression or anxiety that are intolerable. Others drink to cope with stressful situations like unemployment, idleness, lack of upward mobility, failure at one's societal role, and failure to protect the family.

Labels: culture, Fathers, men, mental health, poverty, women

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...My touchstone is my beloved hometown of Yamhill, Ore., population about 925 on a good day. We Americans think of our rural American heartland as a lovely pastoral backdrop, but these days some marginally employed white families in places like Yamhill seem to be replicating the pathologies that have devastated many African-American families over the last generation or two.

One scourge has been drug abuse. In rural America, it’s not heroin but methamphetamine; it has shattered lives in Yamhill and left many with criminal records that make it harder to find good jobs. With parents in jail, kids are raised on the fly.

Then there’s the eclipse of traditional family patterns. Among white American women with only a high school education, 44 percent of births are out of wedlock, up from 6 percent in 1970, according to Murray.

Liberals sometimes feel that it is narrow-minded to favor traditional marriage. Over time, my reporting on poverty has led me to disagree: Solid marriages have a huge beneficial impact on the lives of the poor (more so than in the lives of the middle class, who have more cushion when things go wrong). ...

There aren’t ideal solutions, but some evidence suggests that we need more social policy, not less. Early childhood education can support kids being raised by struggling single parents. Treating drug offenders is far cheaper than incarcerating them.

A new study finds that a jobs program for newly released prison inmates left them 22 percent less likely to be convicted of another crime. This initiative, by the Center for Employment Opportunities, more than paid for itself: each $1 brought up to $3.85 in benefits.

So let’s get real. A crisis is developing in the white working class, a byproduct of growing income inequality in America. The pathologies are achingly real. But the solution isn’t finger-wagging, or averting our eyes — but opportunity.

Labels: children, class, culture, economics, ex-offenders, incarceration, Marriage, men, out-of-wedlock births, poverty, single parenting, women

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The rich are different from you and me: they’re more likely to get married.

A new report, by Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project, looked at the decline in marriage rates over the last 50 years and found a strong connection to income. Dwindling marriage rates are concentrated among the poor — the very people whose living standards would be most improved by having a second household income.

The trend is especially pronounced among men.

Forty years ago, about nine of 10 American men between the ages of 30 and 50 were married, and the most highly paid men were just slightly more likely to wed than those paid least. Since then, earnings for men in the top tenth of the income distribution have risen and their marriage rates have fallen slightly, from 95 percent in 1970 to 83 percent today.

For men further down the income ladder, however, both earnings and their chances of connubial bliss have plummeted.

In inflation-adjusted terms, the median earnings for men in that age group have fallen about 28 percent since 1970. In the same period, their marriage rates have fallen to 64 percent, from 91 percent.

The poorest men have had even sharper financial and romantic declines: men in the bottom quartile of earnings have had a wage cut of 60 percent, and a contemporaneous drop in marriage rates to about 50 percent, from 86 percent. ...

Economically, the last four decades have been a very different story for women. More women have entered the work force, and those in the work force have gotten raises. In 1970, the median annual earnings for female workers 30 to 50 were $19,000; in 2010 the corresponding figure reached about $30,000.

Marriage rates have also fallen for women in that age group on most, though not all, rungs of the income ladder. As with men, the declines are biggest among the poorest workers.

Labels: class, culture, economics, Marriage, men, poverty, women

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People from disadvantaged backgrounds gain financial security by attending college but paradoxically lower their odds of ever marrying, a U.S. researcher says.

Cornell University sociologist Kelly Musick says men and women from the least advantaged backgrounds who attend college can end up stranded between social worlds, reluctant to "marry down" to partners with less education and unable to "marry up" to those from more privileged upbringings, a university release reported Tuesday. ...

"College students are becoming more diverse in their social backgrounds, but they nonetheless remain a socio-economically select group," she said. "It may be difficult for students from less privileged backgrounds to navigate social relationships on campus, and these difficulties may affect what students ultimately gain from the college experience."

College attendance negatively affected marriage chances for the least advantaged individuals, lessening men's and women's odds by 38 percent and 22 percent respectively, while among those in the highest social stratum men who attend college increase their marrying chances by 31 percent and women by 8 percent.

Labels: class, culture, gender differences, Marriage, poverty, universities

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...But for Susan, it turned out, everything wasn’t fine. While Jesus and the church were pulling her in one direction, the judicial system had made an unwelcome appearance and was pulling her in another. The entire time Susan was in prison, the state of Pennsylvania was running a tab on all the welfare dollars her mother received in her children’s names. Consequently, per state law, Susan was held responsible for the total amount upon her release, and soon the welfare department came calling to get its money back.

In our sessions, Susan showed me a raft of increasingly threatening official letters with eye-popping dollar figures that had her practically hyperventilating. The state wanted in excess of $25,000, and wanted it now.

A hearing was scheduled at the Bucks County Courthouse, where Susan was asked to provide documents proving that she had a job and could start paying her child support debt or face returning to jail in contempt of a court order. Obviously, on her janitor’s survival wages Susan had absolutely no capacity to both pay the state and keep a roof over her head. This Sophie's choice is a common dilemma for tens of thousands of single mothers returning to the community from prison who owe the state for the dollars their children depended on in their mother’s absence. ...

Susan protested the high amount of the monthly support payment, explaining that if she paid the debt she couldn’t afford a place to live. I will never forget how painful it was, watching this woman, who had never in her life caught a single break, have to stand before the American justice system and nearly beg for mercy. But for this black woman in this white judge's courtroom there was no mercy to be had. Her criminal record of violent crime, her drug addiction, her prostitution—all of her vices outweighed the spiritual transformation and personal rehabilitation she had experienced in prison, not to mention her clean-as-a-whistle record in her new life.

The judge merely mocked her, saying, “You’ve got a place to live now: Bucks County Correctional Facility for 90 days.” The public defender tried to interject but the judge was already calling for the next case.

Labels: child support, children, class, culture, mental health, motherhood, parenting, poverty, race, religion

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OXNARD, Calif. — Sarah Comito rolls out of bed before dawn most days and slips quietly out of her house. Before her rambunctious toddler wakes up, she heads off to work as a waitress in an upscale weight-loss resort in Malibu.

The hour-long commute is exhausting, but the 33-year-old is thankful to make the trip when she remembers where she and her husband were four years ago: living in a tent in a nearby river bottom, strung out on methamphetamine.

Now Comito fears the progress they have made since then could be lost as California cuts her from a vital child care assistance program, more than doubling the cost of her son’s day care to $600 a month. On a $10 hourly wage, she said she’d be better off quitting her job and staying home with her son while her husband works as a professional tree cutter. But if she stops working, they can’t make rent.

“The only thing I can do is attempt to prepare for the worst,” Comito said, while watching 3-year-old Matthew dart across the yard at the couple’s working-class apartment complex in Oxnard.

For years, child care assistance programs offered low-income parents such as Comito a lifeline. But state legislatures dealing with multibillion dollar budget deficits during the recession have been targeting child care subsidies as one way to help balance their state budgets.

The cuts have come at just the time many parents need that help the most because full-time, well-paying jobs are in such short supply. ...

Some parents give up jobs and turn to the welfare system if they can’t find affordable child care, but that isn’t an option for those who have already used up their entitlements, said Danielle Ewen, a past director of child care and early education for the Center for Law and Social Policy.

Labels: child care, children, economics, motherhood, poverty, single parenting, welfare, work/family policy

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AT Christmastime, we like to tell stories about resilient families. The Cratchits of “A Christmas Carol,” for instance, who subsist on love, hope and 15 shillings a week. The Baileys of Bedford Falls, who survive wars, bank runs and bankruptcies because they have friends, one another, and a guardian angel watching out for them. The first couple of the New Testament, who manage to cope with a supernatural pregnancy, a murderous king and the necessity of delivering a child in the bleak midwinter, half-out-of-doors and far from home.

These stories resonate in part because of how easily they could turn out differently. Not every Tiny Tim has Bob Cratchit as his father and a reformed Scrooge as his benefactor. Not every George Bailey realizes that he shouldn’t jump off the bridge when things look bleakest. And not every unexpectedly expectant mother has a St. Joseph standing by her.

Millions of Americans know this all too well, because the darker possibilities the Christmas stories hint at — divorce, abandonment, childhood suffering — are realities they have to live with every day. But that unhappy knowledge isn’t evenly distributed. In 21st-century America, the well-off and well-educated have the best odds of enjoying the domestic stability that the Yuletide stories celebrate, while the very people who most need resilient families — the Cratchits and Baileys, the working poor and the hard-pressed middle class — are less and less likely to have them. ...

To some extent, the nervous politicians are right. There is no government program that can guarantee a happy childhood or a devoted spouse. (If you replaced Clarence from “It’s a Wonderful Life” or the Angel Gabriel of the Gospels with a Health and Human Services bureaucrat, those stories would probably have a much grimmer ending.)

But public policy can still make a difference in the way we organize our private lives, and public institutions should be designed with existing patterns of social life in mind. Where mating and marrying are concerned, both our policies and our institutions are increasingly out of date: they’re built for a world in which two-parent, single-breadwinner families were a near-universal norm, and they don’t take enough account of the mass entrance of women into the work force, or the mounting economic pressures on the American family.

Labels: children, economics, family policy, parental leave, parenting, poverty, Ross Douthat, tax policy, work/family policy

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If current trends hold, within a few years, less than half the U.S. adult population will be married. This precipitous decline isn’t just a social problem. It’s also an economic problem.

Specifically, it’s an income-inequality and economic-mobility problem. The steadily dropping marriage rate both contributes to income inequality and further entrenches it. ...

It’s not only that those at higher education levels are far more likely to marry — they’re far more likely to marry each other. “Men used to marry their secretaries,” Sawhill observed. “Now they marry the woman they met in med school.”

As a result, Sawhill said, “These two-earner couples at the top are just making out like bandits and these single parents at the bottom have miserable lives. If the single parents were married, their life wouldn’t be so miserable. And at the top, if these high-earning professionals weren’t getting together and forming little collaboratives, they’d be worse off.” ...

Nor does the marriage gap seem destined to lessen. Pew found that 27 percent of those with college degrees say they consider marriage “obsolete.” But 45 percent of those with a high school diploma or less took that view.

A different arm of Pew, its Economic Mobility Project, found that among children who started in the bottom third of income, only one-fourth of those with divorced parents moved up to the middle or top third as adults. By comparison, half of children with continuously married parents — and, somewhat surprisingly, 42 percent of those born to unmarried mothers — moved up the income ladder as adults.

Labels: class, cohabitation, culture, divorce, economics, Marriage, poverty

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Labels: adultery, childhood, children, culture, custody, divorce, economics, Marriage, men, poverty, women

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The younger the parent and the younger the child, the more likely a family is to be poor, according to a new Child Trends report, Two Generations in Poverty: Status and Trends among Parents and Children in the United States, commissioned by Ascend: The Family Economic Security Program at the Aspen Institute. As policy makers ponder the merits of alternative measures of poverty, the Child Trends report outlines the disproportionate effects of poverty on young children, young parents, and children and parents in single-mother families.

Among the report's highlights:

The younger the parent, the more likely a family is to be poor. Households headed by young parents (18-24) are more likely to be poor than households headed by older parents, regardless of marital status.
The younger the child, the more likely a family is to be poor. Families with young children (0-6) are more likely to be poor than families with older children.
Overall poverty rates mask much higher rates for some sub-groups, such as single-mother families, whose poverty rate was 40.7 percent in 2010, compared to 8.8 percent for married-couple families.

Labels: children, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, poverty, single parenting, unmarried parents

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Robert Rector was just wrapping-up his speech to a room of 250 people. That's when about a dozen protestors, who stood with their backs to him, started shouting.

Rector is from the conservative-minded "Heritage Foundation." SRS invited him to speak about childhood poverty.

"The data shows very convincingly that the strongest factor producing long term poverty in the state of Kansas and every other state is the decline in marriage,” Rector said.

Rector wants the state to educate and encourage marriage. It would be an effort to stop single mom households.

“He has raised some good ideas. It's work, it's family structure. And it's not like we're endorsing that idea per see, it's about getting the discussion started to frame it,” SRS Secretary Rob Siedlecki said.

Siedlecki called for a break when the protestors wouldn't stop.

The protesters had papers like this one. It says in part, this was an "orchestrated attempt to promote {a} $6.6 million 'marriage initiative,' a Cinderella/fairy tale solution in the face of increasing poverty." On the back, you can see it's from Occupy Wichita. ...

Response from Joan Wagnon of the Kansas Democratic Party:

I just celebrated my 47th wedding anniversary. I’m the child of parents who were married for 37 years, and the only thing that broke up that union was the death of my father. I believe that children thrive in families with two married, fully participating and emotionally healthy parents. Such a family is able to withstand what life throws at it, from the trials of a bad economy to the frustrations of everyday living. But not everybody has that kind of marriage.

To argue – as the Brownback Administration appears to be doing – that marriage alone will end poverty is simplistic, at the very least, and potentially dangerous. I am particularly concerned that the governor opened his child poverty town hall meetings this week with a speaker who declared that encouraging marriage is the most effective tool policymakers can use to fight poverty.

Marriage can be wonderful, but it can also be horrific.

Before I ever thought about entering politics, I ran the YWCA in Topeka. A year after I started as executive director in 1977, I helped create the city’s Battered Women’s Task Force. I counseled hundreds of women who were facing domestic violence. I found them shelter and helped them put their lives back together.

Labels: domestic violence, government interest in marriage, Kansas, Marriage, poverty

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Two months ago, I posed the question, Who's Had the Worst Recession: Millennials, Gen-Xers, or Boomers? A Pew analysis of Census data released yesterday makes a strong case that it's the youngest generation that faced the worst of the economy -- and that's even before the recession started. ...

Pew's study this week adds an interesting wrinkle to the story. Even before the Great Recession, young families were already falling behind. The big loud statistic from the study is that household wealth for young families has fallen by 70 percent since 1984, while net worth for families with older heads-of-household is up 48 percent. As a result, the wealth gap between young and old families has quadrupled from 10X to 47X in the last 30 years.

Some of this yawning gap between old and young is demographic. The rise in single family households means that more young, poor households have one breadwinner instead of two. As more young people go to college and accumulate debt, they're putting off marriage to work and pay down college loans. Partly as a result of these changes, under-35 poverty levels nearly doubled in the last four decades (see graph to right). Meanwhile, politics came to the aid of the old. The creation of Medicare helped to cut senior poverty levels in half. Social Security is still growing faster than low-income wages.

But much of this change has nothing to do with counting breadwinners per household. Something in the economy dragged down income for new entrants. In households headed by adults younger than 35, Pew reported, the typical adjusted annual income has grown by 27% -- four times slower than for older households. ...

For much of the 20th century, unemployment rates for women and men moved in tandem. But in the Great Recession, unemployment among men surged. Although guys have made up some of the gains in the slow recovery (job growth has been most brisk among low-wage positions) the fact that women now make up a majority of college grads suggests that they will hold on to and extend the gains they made over the last few decades.

But it's terribly misleading to look at graphs like these and conclude that women are somehow winning anything. We're all losing. For a while, women were just losing less dramatically. Still, female unemployment has been over 8% for two years, and if men came out worse in the sharp downturn, women are recovering more slowly in the aftermath. The local government recession has struck at industries like teaching that are female-dominant, while men have made some gains in industries like mining.

Labels: economics, men, poverty, single parenting, women

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What then are the appropriate policy responses to the unsustainable state of family life in many advanced societies? Here are ten proposals that might be helpful:

1. PROMOTE FAMILY ENTERPRISE.
The last generation has seen a rapid increase in corporate consolidation. Whereas rigorous enforcement of antitrust and other policies preserved an important role for small-scale family farms and businesses until the 1980s, today there is almost no check on the growth of giant retailers, agribusinesses, and industrial concerns. As British social theorist Philip Blond has written, “Our fishmongers, butchers, and bakers are driven out—converting a whole class of owner occupiers into low wage earners, employed by supermarkets.” Though it is not possible, or even desirable, to entirely reverse these trends toward monopolization, it is possible to moderate them and thereby carve out more space for family enterprise and entrepreneurship, which will in turn help to rebuild the economic foundation of the family. A good start would be to offer payroll tax breaks to small businesses and to more rigorously enforce existing antitrust laws.

2. INCREASE INCOME SECURITY FOR YOUNG COUPLES.
Young couples contemplating starting a family now face far greater risk than their parents typically did that they will face repeated spells of un- and underemployment. As political scientist Jacob Hacker has demonstrated, even before the Great Recession of 2008, the size of swings in pretax family income from year to year had doubled in the United States since the early 1970s. In Europe, many young adults typically find themselves maneuvering from contract to contract, rather than being able to settle into a secure career that will support a family. In the developing world, young adults often find themselves trying to get ahead amid the swirl of hypercompetitive megacities that seem to have literally no room for children.

There is no single policy lever to pull that will put the family back into a healthy and sustainable balance with global market forces. We must grapple with issues like foreign trade, offshore employment, and downsizing. Yet it is essential that measures of efficiency not be so narrowly defined that they discount the vital role that secure, functioning families play in sustaining economic progress. To soften the blows young adults face from income and employment instability associated with globalization, countries should ensure access to affordable health care and lifetime learning to keep job skills from becoming obsolete. ...

8. ADJUST THE FINANCING OF THE WELFARE STATE TO MEET THE NEEDS OF AN AGING SOCIETY.
All pension and health-care benefits, including those conveyed through the private sector, are ultimately financed by babies and those who raise and educate them. Yet in modern societies, the “nurturing sector” of the economy is starved for resources. Parents in particular rarely receive any material compensation for the sacrifices they make on behalf of their children.

Here is a suggestive policy idea for allowing the nurturing sector to keep a greater share of the value it creates for society: Say to the next generation of young adults, have one child, and your payroll taxes, which support the elderly, will drop by one-third. A second child would be worth a two-thirds reduction in payroll taxes. Have three or more children, and pay no payroll taxes until your youngest child turns 18. When it comes time to retire, your benefits (and your spouse’s) will be calculated just as if you had both been contributing the maximum tax during the period in which you were raising children, provided that all your children have graduated from high school.

Labels: children, culture, demographics, economics, family policy, government interest in marriage, Marriage, parenting, poverty, religion, tax policy, universities, work/family policy

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A few months ago, I was late. You know what I mean: My usual period day came and went without a spot, and suddenly every wave of exhaustion, every twinge of anxious nausea, became a harbinger of a very unintended pregnancy, a sign that my NuvaRing had failed me. I’m married, happily at that. And I’m a mother, happily as well. But our family feels “complete,” as demographers put it, at one child. And so my husband and I had to make a choice—or so we thought, for a very tense week before my body made the choice for me. As we lay awake at night whispering pros and cons for continuing the pregnancy, stopping only when our daughter padded in to snuggle under our covers in the predawn hours, I wondered if our mere deliberating might call into question my soundness as a mother. If I, already happily immersed in parenting, chose to terminate, wouldn’t I be unusual for doing so, maybe even stigmatized as a sort of prenatal Medea?

I was wrong. Women who are already mothers have more abortions than anyone else, and by an increasingly wide margin. When Guttmacher Institute researchers last ran the numbers in 2008 [pdf] they found that 61 percent of women who terminate a pregnancy in this country already have at least one child. That was before the recession, though—before the poverty rate rose to swallow 40.7 percent of women who head families, many of whom know they can’t afford another child.* So I asked the National Abortion Federation, a professional association of abortion providers, to run the numbers on the women visiting their clinics and calling their hotlines in the past few years. The resulting figures shocked NAF President Vicki Saporta, who called to tell me that every year since 2008, a whopping 72 percent of NAF clients looking to terminate a pregnancy were already mothers, up at least 10 percent from the years before the economy crashed.

But while the typical abortion patient is a mother, very few people seem to realize it. ...

For her part, Rachel Jones, a senior research associate at the Guttmacher Institute, thinks that public perceptions of who aborts and why are skewed mostly as a result of all the political heat around late-term abortions and adolescent abortions (minors have only 7 percent of all abortions). In other words, she argues, mothers who abort are invisible not because anyone is conspiring to keep them that way, but because so much attention is focused on other women.

But why do mothers have so many abortions in the first place? Jones co-authored a qualitative study titled "I Would Want To Give My Child, Like, Everything in the World: How Issues of Motherhood Influence Women Who Have Abortions," which found that most mothers who abort say they are doing so to protect the kids they already have. As Jones points out, that rationale is tough to demonize politically, especially when you consider that most women making this choice are contending with some combination of low income, unemployment, and a lack of health insurance, or are struggling to raise kids on their own.

Labels: abortion, culture, economics, motherhood, poverty, single parenting

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...South Korea has been grappling with shifting demographics that have left many middle-aged men cut adrift in a country that prizes marriage. As Korean women leave their hometowns for careers in the big cities, the men left behind are increasingly looking for brides from poorer Asian nations such as Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia, and Mongolia.

More than 100,000 women among South Korea’s 1.2-million foreign population are estimated to be foreign brides. This influx of foreigners has accelerated multiculturalism in Korea. But many of those marriages don’t turn out well. Part of the problem, say experts, is a lack of government oversight of agencies that locate foreign brides for Korean men. The result, say critics, is hundreds of unhappy marriages between middle-aged Korean men and young foreign women trying to escape poverty.

Korean men seeking to wed foreign brides are now required to take courses to prepare them for international unions.

Labels: Asia, economics, Marriage, marriage counseling, men, poverty, South Korea, women

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