In my recent memoir manuscript, I claim that teen pregnancy is a primary reason girls drop out of high school. It’s something I just “know” but I can’t recall where I heard it. In the process of revising the book for an academic audience, I spent hours online this week to find a source. As so often happens, I fell into a rabbit hole and found many compelling reasons girls drop out of school, including an unplanned pregnancy.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington backs up my claim, but they don’t cite sources. Other sources attribute pregnancy as one of several reasons girls drop out of high school, in addition to economic conditions, early marriage, and family situations. One National Institutes of Health article states that adolescents who live in poverty are up to five times more likely to become pregnant than more economically advantaged female students. The more complete answer to why teen girls don’t graduate is complicated.
I had one student who dropped out of our program shortly after her daughter was born so that she could care for her mother’s twin babies, born close to her daughter’s birth. My student cared for all three infants until her mother’s serious childbirth complications resolved. She returned the following year and graduated a couple of years later.
Many organizations have worked for years to decrease the teen pregnancy rate, and their efforts have succeeded to a large degree. One of the reasons it’s imperative to decrease the rate is to prevent high school dropouts, and thereby decrease the traumatic consequences of dropping out for both mother and child.
According to the World Health Organization, the most relevant factors leading to teen pregnancy globally are lower educational achievement, economic instability, and lack of access to birth control. While the WHO is mainly concerned with the health risks to adolescents in low- and middle-income nations, the same issues are at play in the US.
The WHO also estimates that as of 2019, 55 percent of unintended pregnancies among adolescent girls aged fifteen to nineteen end in abortion. The US Office of Population Affairs, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services estimated that in 2017, the abortion rate among American teens was 23 to 28 percent. One wonders how the recent Roe v Wade decision will affect that statistic.
In addition to these concerns, in some cultures, early marriage is encouraged. I had several married Asian and Latina students in my classroom over the years, all seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. In some ways, these girls had more stable relationships and focused more on schoolwork, but often they had added obligations at home. Several of our Hmong students married and moved in with their husbands’ families. At that point, the mother-in-law assigned their son’s wife a share of the household duties.
The relationship between teen pregnancy and dropping out of school is not necessarily a simple cause and effect equation. While an unplanned pregnancy at sixteen may not in itself lead to a decision to leave school, a combination of factors put teen girls at risk of failing to graduate. A pregnancy may be the last straw.
Every mother, of any age, will agree there are overwhelming challenges associated with becoming a parent, not to mention all the pregnancy-related health concerns. Attending school and succeeding academically at the same time is beyond many adolescents’ capabilities, without adequate support systems. Our program, a collaboration between a United Way nonprofit and the local school district, provided just that for more than 30 years.
Janice Airhart 