Hacker News Reader

Comment by personjerry | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it typically "teen pregnancy" rather than "teen birth"? Is the nuance between pregnancy and birth significant?

Also, this wording can seem confusing (i.e. you can't give birth to a teen!).

From the perspective of someone who would have to run a study like this, a tremendous amount of pregnancies end before detection. To do actual pregnancy-initiation studies, you have to do absurdly intensive things like have women collect their urine on a frequent basis for analysis. Birth is a much less difficult outcome to collect for a large scale population estimate, as it usually just involves a data pull from vital records.

Births are what matter, as a pregnant teen can get an abortion, resulting in skewed statistics if you're trying to figure out how many teens are having babies, which (imo) is the thing society should actually care about, as unready parents tend to be a drain on collective/social resources.

>Births are what matter, as a pregnant teen can get an abortion, resulting in skewed statistics if you're trying to figure out how many teens are having babies...

That's true, but if your argument is the lower number of births is due to widespread availability of contraception, you have to address pregnancy and not just births.

Access to abortions is just as important as access to contraceptives.

Important for what?

Teen pregnancy rates will be higher than teen birth rates in jurisdictions that are not hostile to abortion. But teen birth rate is probably a far easier statistic to gather.

The birth rate is always lower than the pregnancy rate. Miscarriages are common.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com