The Role of Sexual Education in the Teen Birth Decline

• In Event: 2266 - Family Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 19. Sex, Sexuality, and Choices about Having Children

Abstract

Women in the United States are more likely become mothers as teens than in any other rich country, but the U.S. teen birth rate has been in steep decline in recent decades. In this paper, we leverage variation between counties and over time in state mandates and federal funding from 1998 to 2016 to test whether sexual education contributed to this decline. We differentiate between abstinence-only and comprehensive sexual education, and find that while abstinence-only education increased or had no effect on the teen birth rate, comprehensive sexual education consistently decreased the rate at which teens aged 14-19 gave birth. In percentage terms, these effects were largest for the youngest women. These findings contribute to the literature on teen fertility by providing the first plausibly causal estimates of the effect of comprehensive sexual education at the population level, updating previous estimates of the effect of abstinence-only sexual education, and differentiating the effects of sexual education by age.

Authors

• Nicholas Mark, NYU

• Lawrence L. Wu, New York University