SCIENCE / MEDICINE : Early Childbearing Based on Logic

Black teen-agers who have children are not acting irrationally, despite the high incidence of health problems among both mothers and children, researchers said. Instead, they are simply responding to social realities.

As the girls get older, their reality is that they become less healthy, there are fewer men around, and they may need to enter the work force, said sociologist Arline Geronimus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Furthermore, they have to rely on family members to help with the children and those members may not be available later in life.

“I’m not implying that a teen-age girl sits down and thinks this through,” Geronimus said. But “the fact is that early childbearing is a persistent pattern in history for whole populations of women.”

UCLA sociologist Walter Allen noted that most middle-class teen-age girls are on their way to economic stability, which includes a husband and a job, so they postpone child-bearing. But under-class girls are unlikely ever to reach such stability, so they could wait forever to have children. In short, there is no disincentive for having children early.