Recession dragged down birth rates for less-educated - By Emily Alpert - Los Angeles Times - my commentary

Original article found here. Reproduced here for fair use and discussion purposes. My comments in bold.

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Poorly educated women is a euphemism for the poor. This article is not about education, it is about reducing unwanted pregnancies. The Left has been trumpeting free birth control as a right, claiming it is a means to reduce unwanted pregnancies and therefore abortions. I posted a FB conversation about the muddled thinking regarding this issue. 

Though they would never admit it, the Left has this disturbing tendency to lean toward eugenics. They are always careful to couch their advocacy in terms of civil rights or compassion, but it still amounts to reducing the fertility of undesirables.  

So here we have the real solution for lowering birth rates for undesirables: Economic insecurity. The Left hates it when undesirables have babies, so obviously the recession has actually been a good thing. 

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 LOS ANGELES — Birthrates were dramatically reduced during the recession among women who did not finish high school, a development that far outpaced the drop among women with higher levels of education, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center.

Between 2008 and 2011, birthrates fell 13 percent among women who hadn’t finished high school — nearly twice as much as for women who had earned bachelor’s degrees or more, Pew found. The overall drop continued a trend among U.S. women for the past five decades.

“When people feel that their economic foundations are insecure, they’re often reluctant to have a child,” said Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, which wasn’t involved in the Pew study. “We’ve seen this for many years in places like Spain and Italy and Greece — a real problem of unemployment that is linked to low levels of fertility.”

Declining birthrates among women without high school diplomas, combined with increased education for American women, has helped push the percentage of new mothers with at least some college education to its highest point ever, Pew found.

Census data reveal that between 1960 and 2011, the share of new mothers with at least some college education leaped from 18 percent to 66 percent.

Higher education levels among mothers can translate to benefits for their children, researchers have found. More highly educated mothers tend to have healthier babies who do better in school later, researchers have
found. It is unclear, however, whether education is the reason, or whether educated mothers are different in other ways that help their children, such as being better off economically, Pew wrote.

A shift toward more educated mothers could also affect what motherhood looks like: Less educated mothers are more likely to be unmarried and have their children at younger ages.

Almost half of new mothers without high school diplomas were younger than 25, and only 3 percent of new mothers with bachelor’s degrees were as young, Pew found.