How to deal with teenage pregnancy

Is rising teen pregnancy something we just have to live with? Or can something be done about it? And what about marriage? Can Government policy really influence marriage rates?

Mickey Kaus has been trawling through the latest stats in the US:

The rate of teenage childbearing for blacks has been cut by more than half since its peak in 1991. It's now substantially lower than the teen birthrate for Hispanics. Though I'd like to credit welfare reform, causality here is complicated - new birth control technologies (e.g. Norplant) and fear of AIDS are big potential factors. And nationwide welfare reform didn't happen until 1996.

If you want to find evidence of a sociological impact for welfare reform, look at this chart. It shows that the percentage of black children living with two married parents jumped from 33 per cent in 1996 to 38 per cent in 2002 (when the Census changed the definition of "black"). Meanwhile, the percentage of black children living with "mother only" fell from 53 per cent to 48 percent.

Those figures still aren't very promising - the percentage of white children living with two married parents is 76 (and for Hispanics it's 66). Still, the improvement for blacks is significant. Why isn't welfare reform to blame? If a single mother is going to have to work, it makes sense to team up with another breadwinner.