The impact of sex education mandates on teenage pregnancy: International evidence

Abstract

To date most studies of the impact of school-based sex education have focused either on specific, local interventions or experiences at a national level. In this paper, we use a new cross-country dataset to explore the extent to which laws on sex education affect teenage pregnancy rates in developed countries. We find some evidence that laws mandating sex education in schools are associated with higher rates of teenage fertility. Parental opt out laws may minimise adverse effects of sex education mandates for younger teens. The estimated effects of mandatory sex education are robust to some but not all of our specifications designed to tease out causality. Taken together, changes in national laws relating to sexual health are unable to explain the significant declines in teenage pregnancy rates, which have been observed in many developed countries in recent years.

Socio-demographic, maternal, and infant characteristics associated with early childhood development delays among children of young mothers in Brasília, Brazil

“…In addition, young people can face significant barriers to accessing health care, including a relative lack of knowledge and experience, prohibitive out-of-pocket costs, and restrictive policies that perpetuate stigma and make it harder to receive comprehensive, confidential services [ 32 ]. While sexual and reproductive health education is an integral aspect of adolescent health care [ 52 ], underlying socio-economic factors have been more clearly associated with changes in adolescent fertility rates [ 53 ]. Wide-ranging evidence links educational attainment to future employment, health, and wellbeing which in turn supports parents in providing nurturing-care environments that promote favorable patterns of development and help buffer against biological and environmental threats to ECD [ 9 , 32 , 39 , 54 ].…”

The Puzzle of Falling US Birth Rates since the Great Recession

“…These include the generosity of welfare benefits (Moffitt 1998;Grogger, Karoly, and Klerman 2002;Lopoo and Raissan 2012;Ziliak 2016), the state minimum wage (Bullinger 2017), and child support enforcement (which affects the opportunity cost of fathering a child, see Aizer and McLanahan 2005). We also include a number of reproductive health policies that potentially affect a woman's ability to achieve her desired fertility, including abortion restrictions in the form of parental notification laws and waiting periods (Levine 2004), health insurance coverage through Medicaid (DeLeire, Lopoo, and Simon 2011), mandatory coverage of contraception in private insurance plans, and state mandatory sex education and mandatory contraception instruction laws (Paton, Bullivant, and Soto 2020). We hold constant the demographic composition of female adults in each state and year (specifically, the share White, Black, Hispanic, married, and in four different education groups).…”

Knowledge and Perception of Teenage Pregnancy in a Semi-Urban Setting in Rivers State, Nigeria

“…It is also linked to an increased risk of adverse pregnancy and childbirth outcomes compared to older women. More than 70,000 adolescent girls die every year because of these complications mainly in rural countries [7,9,10]. Most maternal and child morbidity and mortality are related to hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, infections, low birth weight, and preterm delivery [10][11][12].…”

“…African countries have the highest rates of teenage birth (2002) According to data from World Bank, as of 2015, the highest incidence of births among 13-to 19-year-old girls was in Niger, Mali, Angola, Guinea, and Mozambique [5,12]. It has been observed that teenage is one of the major causes of morbidity rates among girls due to increased rate of abortion, obstructed labour, high blood pressure, bleeding during delivering, child abuse, anaemia, frustration, depression and emotional stress, both in communities and developing countries [1,5,15]. Majority of teenage pregnancy cases are reported in low-middleincome countries such as Nigeria [16][17][18].…”