U.S. Abortion Rate Falls to Lowest Rate Ever. NewsWire

NEWSWIRE: 9/23/19

• America’s abortion rate has fallen to its lowest level ever since abortion became legal in 1973. The study’s authors cited greater use of contraceptives and fewer pregnancies as the main drivers for the decline; there’s little evidence that the proliferation of state laws restricting abortion played a role. (Guttmacher Institute)
• NH: For the last 45 years--ever since Roe v Wade--America's high abortion rate has been a culture-war battle cry. Conservatives lament the decline in moral values that allows parents (mainly women) to regard unborn infants as disposable. Progressives condemn a repressive patriarchy (mostly men) whose opposition to sex education, family planning, and equal rights has driven women to seek abortion as a last resort.
• One quick look at the data ought to persuade both sides that they need to give their arguments a fundamental makeover.
• According to conservatives, America has been inundated with a rising tide of abortions ever since Roe v Wade. But the U.S. abortion rate (per 1,000 women age 18-45) has been declining for the last 38 years (since 1981). And it has been below the rate at the time of Roe v Wade for the last five years (2013). That, in fact, is the biggest news out of this new Guttmacher report: The U.S. abortion rate in 2017 (at 13.5) is 18% lower than it was in the year of the Roe-v-Wade decision (16.3). In other words, fewer abortions are happening today per capita than when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state and federal abortion prohibitions by declaring that women possess a limited constitutional right to an abortion. (See the first chart below.)
• Relative to other nations, to be sure, the U.S. abortion rate was once relatively high. Ten or twenty years ago, it was lower than only a handful of other large countries that had halfway reliable data--like Russia or China or Sweden. It was higher than in most of the rest of the developed world. But today even this is no longer true. At 13.5, the U.S. abortion rate is about on par with that of New Zealand, Australia, France, the UK, and the rest of northern and western Europe.
• Progressives, on the other hand, cite the declining abortion rate as a sign of growing patriarchal repression: Thanks to the cultural right's pronatalist agenda, some claim, women are being forced to bear children they don't want. (It's a plotline taken right out of The Handmaid's Tale, the dystopian novel by Barbara Atwood which has sold an astounding 8 million copies and is now a popular Hulu TV drama.)
• Yet this story, too, has problems. If it were true, it would necessarily imply regional differences in the abortion-rate decline. Presumably, the decline would be weaker or would not occur at all in blue-zone states whose policies and social attitudes toward abortion are very tolerant (like Massachusetts, Vermont, or Oregon). And it would be steeper in red-zone states with less tolerant policies and attitudes and where ever-fewer providers perform abortions (like Idaho, Alabama, or Mississippi).
• Though the Guttmacher researchers looked carefully for such regional differences, they could not find any. The abortion rate has been declining at roughly the same rate in every region. And states supportive of abortion rights, mainly in the northeast and west, have seen declines equal to the declines in the states that have recently restricted access to abortion. (See the second and third charts below.)
• One reason restrictive policies don't have much impact, the researchers hypothesize, is that the (increasingly) older women seeking abortion find it easy to cross state lines to find a provider. Another reason is the rapid recent growth in "medication abortions," which now constitute 39% of all abortions. Women can now safely induce early abortions in a self-care or tele-doc setting, and the drugs themselves are available by mail order. (See the fourth chart below.)
• What's more, if the pronatalism theory were correct, we should be seeing rising birth rates--in some states at least--as the abortion rate is forced down. But we aren't seeing that. Yes, red states have long had higher fertility rates than blue states. But over the last decade, the TFR has been declining nation-side nearly every year--and it has been declining at roughly equal rates by region and by state.
• The bottom line is that both abortion rates and birth rates are declining because pregnancy rates are declining. It's that simple. To quote from another Guttmacher report: "Because both abortions and births declined, it is clear that there were fewer pregnancies overall in the United States in 2017 than in 2011. The big question is why."
• Actually, we pretty much know why. Rates of sexual activity are declining, especially among the young. Contraceptive methods are improving and are being implemented more conscientiously. And young adults are less likely to be married. Spearheading all three of these trends--less sex, growing risk aversion, and delayed marriage--are today's younger cohorts, Millennials, and Homelanders.
• And that is why the youngest age brackets (teens and early 20s) have experienced the steepest declines in abortion rates, just as they have also experienced the steepest declines in birth rates. (See "U.S. Fertility Passes Another (Ominous) Milestone.")

• Actress Felicity Huffman recently became the first parent to be sentenced in the Varsity-Blues college cheating scandal. The pre-sentencing letter she wrote to the judge offers a revealing glimpse into the psyche of a desperate mom who would go to any lengths to see her child succeed. (MarketWatch)
• NH: Huffman's 1,400-word letter--both poignant and pathetic--deserves to be read in its entirety. You could interpret it as a tragicomedy scripted by a wealthy neurotic mom, with access to too many shrinks and therapists, raising her daughter in la-la land. But you could also interpret it generationally. Here you have a throw-away Gen-X woman who finally decides to have a late-Millennial child and who wants to raise that child absolutely perfectly--but who then discovers she has no personal experience with what it means to be a mom at all
• That's the pathetic part of the letter. "I find Motherhood bewildering. From the moment my children were born I worried that they got me as a Mother. I so desperately wanted to do it right and was so deathly afraid of doing it wrong.” Her low self-esteem as a mom led directly to the employment of outside experts and counselors to do the job for her--and ultimately to paying Rick Singer a bribe to get someone to "doctor" her daughter's SAT score.
• She describes the comeuppance when her daughter finally learns in horror about the cheating scandal. First, there's the shame in knowing that her mom is probably going to jail after a nationally publicized trial. Then the knowledge that her own mom didn't think she was smart enough to pass the exam on her own. And finally, the suspicion that, after all, maybe she really wasn't smart enough. All this from the frantic efforts of a Gen-X snowplow mom trying to make "everything right" for her kid.
• In 2018, the share of Americans without health insurance grew significantly for the first time in a decade. The spike was unusual given the strong economy and was driven primarily by a decrease in Medicaid enrollment, with uninsured rates rising most among Hispanics and the foreign-born. (U.S. Census Bureau)
• NH: The Census Bureau traditionally releases two annual reports for the prior year at about the same time. This fall, both releases were for 2018.
• The first was Income and Poverty in the United States: 2018. There was not a lot of "news" in this release--and what news there was mostly good, which never makes for a click-bait headline. Real median family income increased but only just barely (by +0.9%). Agreed, not much news there. But check further down in the numbers and you see evidence that 2018's robust employment growth is having a real impact on lower-income working families. Real median earnings of all workers rose by +3.4%. Meanwhile, the highest quintile shrank slightly--and the lowest quintile grew slightly--as a share of all income. So overall inequality eased.
• As for the official poverty rate, it declined to 11.8%, which is the lowest rate since 2000 and 2001. Before that, you'd have to go back to 1977 to find a lower poverty rate. (See the first chart below.) The Trump White House celebrated this news, but few mainstream media outlets picked it up. Other findings in this report give fewer grounds for celebration. The real income of seniors (+3.3%) continued to outpace that of working-age families (+1.0%). By region, real median income grew fastest in the Northeast (+4.3%) and slowest in the South (+0.3%).
• The other publication was Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2018. The news here, for what it's worth, is that the share of Americans without health insurance was up slightly in 2018 after declining for the previous seven years (since 2010). This finding was avidly picked up by the media. Driving the decline was some tightening in state eligibility standards for Medicaid. Also, some people may have been opting out of private plans, perhaps due to the repeal of ACA's penalty (at the end of 2017) on Americans who go without health insurance.
• I say "for what it's worth" because the margins of error don't really allow much exactitude here. In fact, according to an alternative American Community Survey--taken yearly by the Census--, the uninsured rate did not so much rise in 2018 as simply level out after its substantial decline due to the implementation of ACA. (See the second chart below.)

• Overall demand for psychiatric care is higher than ever, but more people are leaving the profession than entering it. The need for mental health professionals is especially acute in rural areas—-and perhaps the most dire in Montana, the state with the highest suicide rate. (Bloomberg Businessweek)
• NH: I have written frequently on the rising--and still largely unmet--demand for mental health services in America. (See "Treating America's Mental Health Epidemic.") Colleges are rapidly enlarging their counseling facilities for students (see "Mental Health Counseling Goes to School"). Service members and vets are plagued by a costly rise in emotional disabilities (see "Nearly Half of Post-9/11 Vets Have a Service-Connected Disability.") Xers and Boomers are taking their risk-prone lifestyles--along with depression, addiction, and living alone--into older phases of life (see "Boomer Malaise" and "Indicators of Despair Rising Among Adults in Their 30s and 40s"). All age groups are experiencing an accelerating rise in suicide (see "America's Suicide Rate--Up One-Third Since 1999").
• Where the perfect storm of rising demand meets utterly inadequate supply is in rural America. Here you have lots of aging Xers and Boomers. All of their problems are compounded by the growing social isolation of rural life (many of these states as depopulating and small towns are losing retailers). And they are compounded further by the go-solo entrepreneurial ethic of country living and by a Marlboro-Man antipathy to "talking over" one's problems. Social isolation, we know, is a known predictor of depression and suicide. (See "All the Lonely People.")
• Ground zero, according to this Bloomberg essay, is eastern Montana--a region boasting the highest suicide rate in America and only one psychiatrist within hundreds of miles. But unmet demand isn't just a problem in rural areas. Even in booming urban centers brimming with mental-health professionals, only the affluent have easy access to them. Most providers do not accept insurance reimbursement. And those who do have long waiting lines.
• Why do mental health services have such a hard time proving their cost-effectiveness to insurers and legislators? Good question. God knows our system lavishes reimbursements on every other type of health-care provider--from radiologists to orthopedic surgeons--with hardly any proof of benefit.
• But as long as this bias exists, mental-health care will continue to be subject to intense efforts to raise productivity--including AI diagnosis aids, more televisual consults and tele-doc services, and more reliance on behavioral regimens and medication. Some practitioners, at the extreme, advocate recruiting social media groups and the public at large in helping to treat people who are emotionally suffering. (Since the cost is zero, the ROR here could, in theory, be infinite.)
• In a new essay, author Joel Kotkin explores the broad implications of our increasingly “post-familialist” era. Among the trends he highlights is the possibility that the traditionally religious, who tend to have larger families, will outnumber non-believers in the long run. (Quillette)
• NH: "Tell me a state's fertility rate, and I'll tell you how it voted." So wrote Lauren Sandler in New York magazine back in November of 2012, just after Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney that year. She noted that the 10 states with the highest fertility rate all voted for the Republican and that the 11 states with the lowest fertility rate all voted for the Democrat.
• Well, guess what? In 2016, America's birth polarity grew even stronger. The top 12 most fertile states voted for Trump. And the top 11 least fertile states voted for Clinton.
• In this thoughtful essay, Joel Kotkin explores two profound implications of this growing ideological polarization between post-family and pro-family citizenry.
• One implication, which can be observed both in America and Europe, is the reshaping of party lines. Since Trump, the GOP is attracting working-class adults with families who used to vote for Democrats. The Democrats, meanwhile, are attracting urban and suburban singles (these include Stan Greenberg's "unmarried women") who aren't thinking much about families and who used to vote for Republicans.
• Kotkin notes, rightly I think, that the same polarization can be seen in the new sorting-out happening in Europe--between burgeoning right-wing populist parties and burgeoning left-wing Green parties. The former tend to be more religious, rural, ethnocentric, and pro-family. The latter tend to be more secular, urban, cosmopolitan, and post-family. Pro-familists believe people should be encouraged to have more kids (to sustain society for the next generation). Post-familists tend to believe that people should be discouraged from having kids (to prevent humanity from over-burdening the earth).
• The other implication is longer term. Inevitably--if there is a longer term--the pro-familists will win the argument. Why? Simple: Either the post-familists change their mind, or they will die out.
• This is related to Eric Kaufmann's thesis (as laid out in his book, Will the Righteous Inherit the Earth?) that, as fertility rates in recent decades become increasingly correlated with religiosity, the growth of devout monotheism around the world is virtually assured by the end of the century. Population projections run by the Pew Research Center basically confirm this likely shift. (This expectation is not widely held. Interestingly, Pew notes in a survey that a large 4-to-1 majority of Americans believe the opposite: namely, that people with no religion will rise over the long run as a share of the world’s total.) See "Nations Labor to Raise Their Birthrates" for my discussion of the influence of religion on fertility.
• Part-time work is key to helping women stay in the workforce, but it’s also holding them back. Part-time jobs tend to have worse pay and fewer chances for advancement, and the gap between them and full-time positions has widened as the premium for working long hours has risen dramatically. (The Economist)
• NH: At first glance, the availability of part-time work is hugely beneficial for both women and society as a whole. It's beneficial for women because women, far more than men, prefer less-than-full-time schedules--often because they are busy raising children. In the EU, for example, 32% of employed women work part-time versus only 8% of men. It's beneficial for society because it enables many women to work who otherwise would not want to--boosting family incomes, GDP, and tax revenue.
• But as The Economist points out, part-time work may also be a problem for women because, typically, it pays less per hour and is accompanied by lower status and fewer benefits. The debate among social scientists is over why this is so.
• Some argue that this is an efficient market outcome, either because jobs with long hours carry a productivity premium that comes with nonstop immersion or because the sorts of tasks that can be carried out well by full-timers simply can't be done at all by part-timers. According to an NBER study, this "long-hours premium" has been rising steadily in the U.S. since the 1970s, perhaps due to the rising supply of lower-skilled labor to which part-time work is more easily adapted. And, to some extent, women have responded by raising their hours closer to a full-time schedule. (See "Women Are Working More and Relaxing Less.")
• Others disagree. They say that much high-paying professional work is arbitrarily organized in ways that benefit high-hours workers--who tend to be men. I recently discussed an interesting case in point: medical careers, which, thanks to the rise of group practices, are starting to pay part-time physicians at nearly the same hourly rate as full-time physicians. This is making medicine a much better career choice for women than law or management. (See "Goodbye, Dr. Welby" and "Medicine Emerges as the Unlikely Family-Friendly Profession.") Whether other professions will or can follow suit remains an open question.
• The success of Peloton, the maker of high-end exercise bikes, illustrates the continuing shift from products to services. Revenue has doubled since last year in part thanks to growth in subscriptions, which make up about 20% of the pie—a share that’s expected to keep rising. (The Economist)
• NH: After much speculation, Peloton announced it has filed its SEC paperwork and will be going public by the end of this year. Hyped by some as the cutting edge of "connected fitness" or as the "Netflix of fitness," it will surely attract plenty of retail investors.
• The IPO has lots of positives. Peloton is a well-known, high-end, aspirational brand, which means it can command hefty margins. It has already signed on half a million subscribers (double last year's number), so it has established a proof of concept. And the basic purchase model--combine a big hardware price with a follow-up subscription price--appeals to economists' two-part tariff theory. People will spend a lot more in a bar when they have to pay a cover charge upfront.
• The only real negative is the possibility that other brands will quickly emulate the Peloton formula and crowd the market. (As with Netflix, but this could happen a lot quicker.) There are established high-end brands like NordicTrack and Nautilus that already offer "connected workouts" and could quickly move into this space. And there are new connected fitness players like Hydrow and Mirror offering packages that are arguably even more innovative than Peloton's. And then there is the multitude of in-person rowing centers like SoulCycle, which will continue to be a superior draw to Millennials demanding real human interaction.
• Still, The Economist is probably right. The flexibility and autonomy offered by at-home-but-linked-in workouts does seem like an idea whose time has come--and for older Xers and Boomers at least as much as for Millennials.
• Author Peter Beinart wants to know: “Has the Presidency Skipped Gen X?” Despite the handful of Xer candidates in the running, their chances for the White House look remote—partly, he argues, due to a mismatch between the timing of their political careers and the recent ideological makeover of the Democratic Party. (The Atlantic)
• NH: I have written often about Gen-X's historically slow ascendance into political leadership. At its current age, no previous American generation has gained such a small share of state governorships or the U.S. Congress. No generation has been represented so weakly, to this point, in presidential primaries. And no generation expresses such little enthusiasm about civic participation. See my discussion in "Gen X's Short-Lived Presidential Spotlight" and in "Hey Gen-Xers, Hold Your Horses On Becoming CEO."
• Beinart points out that Xers, who came of age with anti-government Reaganism (on the right) and with pro-market neoliberalism (on the left), just seem to feel out of place in a world today gravitating toward populism and statism. All that is true enough. But I would add that it's not just the content of the Xers' individual reforms that seem misdirected (I'm thinking here of Scott Walker or Ted Cruz or, even more, of Harris, Gillibrand, Booker, O'Rourke, and Castro). It's also the very tone of their reforms. They seem so narrow, small-bore, and transactional in an era looking for sweeping rhetoric and broad-gauged solutions.
• In 2016, Trump, a Boomer, swept the Xers aside in the Republican Party. And in 2020 it looks equally likely that two Silent and a Boomer--Biden, Sanders, and Warren--are going to sweep the Xers aside in the Democratic Party
• According to NYU professor Caitlin Zaloom, paying the high cost of college forces middle-class parents into impossible binds. When college is seen as a moral obligation, parents will do anything to meet it—despite the fact that in many cases, the amount spent doesn’t end up paying off for them or their children. (The New York Times)
• NH: IMO, the vast tuitions that American families pay to brand-name colleges--roughly $100 billion this year--is a travesty. If Bryan Caplan is even partly right (see his book, The Case Against Education), these prices bear little connection to any value-added by the institutions themselves. Rather, they mainly reflect a scarcity rent, paid by parents to these gate-keeper brands. The rents, in turn, are protected by extensive collegiate marketing, by alumni networks, by heavy regulation, and by risk-averse employers. The last U.S. Secretary of Education to fight hard for cost-effectiveness measures for higher ed was Margaret Spellings under President GW Bush. Her efforts were brutally shot down by the higher-ed lobby.
• Meanwhile, seeing no practical alternative, America's middle-class families keep bravely paying--and their kids keep bravely borrowing. No lack of parental altruism here! The NYU professors found widespread instances of Boomers and Xers depleting their retirement savings to make sufficient funds available for college--and even after college. (See "Eight in Ten Parents of Older Children Provide Financial Support.") The money they spend may end up helping their children rise economically. Or sinking themselves economically. Or both.
• Surprise: Kids who don’t date are socially better-adjusted than their peers, according to a new study. 10th graders who weren’t in a romantic relationship were rated more highly on their social skills and leadership than their peers who dated; they also reported lower ratings of depression. (Journal of School Health)
• NH: The authors tested a proposition that most social scientists had simply taken for granted--which is that "dating" members of the opposite sex as a teenager is all part of normal development. This implied that not dating must be abnormal and probably a symptom of development arrest or dysfunction. Indeed, back in the 1950s, it was expected that dating would be routinely followed by going steady, engagement, and marriage. Those who didn't date were therefore unlikely to have a normal life.
• The authors figured that times had changed. Admittedly, their study was limited in n-size and geographical diversity. But its conclusions are eye-opening. Apparently, kids who don't date develop as well or better--by pretty much any objective indicator--as those who do.
• Could this be a generational trend? Hard to say. Xer pundits like Jean Twenge are openly supportive of the recent trend among teens and young adults toward later development--driving later, working later, drinking later, having sex later, graduating college and getting married later, and leaving home later. Maybe she could add to that, dating later.

DID YOU KNOW?

Youth Lead on Climate Change, But Not By Much. A solid majority of both American adults (79%) and teens (86%) believe that human-caused climate change is happening, according to a new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation and The Washington Post. Fully 39% of teens and 43% of young adults believe that it will cause a great deal of harm to their generation, about 10 percentage points more than those 30 and older. At the same time, though action on climate change is typically framed as a youth movement—for example, in coverage of last week’s global climate strike—it doesn’t stand out among other issues in young people’s minds. About a third (34%) of teens consider climate change a “very important” issue, but they give similar rankings to health care (38%), gun laws (35%), and the economy (32%). Fewer than half have taken action to reduce their own carbon footprint, with the most common being recycling and using alternatives to cars.