Sociodemographic Factors and Type of Teen Birth across Birth Cohorts

Anne Driscoll, National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), CDC

The nonmarital birth rate and the proportion of births to unmarried women have increased in recent decades. Births to cohabiting women have risen as cohabitation itself has become more common. This research combines trends in factors associated with teen fertility and the risk of a teen birth by informal marital status (IMS) across three decades of women using data from the NSFG. There were no cohort differences in the odds of a marital birth; the odds of cohabiting births rose and of single births declined across cohorts. Similar proportions of each birth cohort had a teen birth, but the IMS of these first births changed across cohorts. In most cases, the association between predictors and IMS of teen births is stable across cohorts but the change in the proportion of cohorts in higher risk categories appears to contribute to changes in IMS of teen births.