What Explains Persistently High Teen Fertility in Latin America?

Back when I was in college, my grandmother (born in 1914) warned me not to get too serious with any young man if I wanted to finish my education. In their recent work on education and adolescent fertility in Latin America, Ann Garbett and her coauthors found solid evidence that the world still works the way my grandmother thought it did, but there have been other social changes that matter for age at first birth.

Garbett and her colleagues framed their work as solving a demographic puzzle—figuring out how trends that seem to contradict one another coexist in real life. In this case, the question was how can adolescent fertility have remained stubbornly high in a region where overall fertility came way down, and rates of girls’ schooling went way up? It would be more intuitive if schooling expansion reduced births among women of all ages, but especially adolescents. In Latin America, however, teen births fell more slowly than other births instead of more quickly: about a third of Latin American women still become mothers during adolescence.

About a third of Latin American women still become mothers during adolescence. 

The researchers solved the puzzle by separating two major pathways through which schooling affects entry into motherhood. The first pathway is what the research literature calls the “incarceration effect,” an amusing label that refers to time adolescent girls spend attending school directly reducing teenage fertility levels. The second pathway, known as the aspirational effect of schooling, continues to matter after leaving school—it refers to education changing life goals and expectations.

One of the most remarkable things that the researchers found is that my grandma’s old-fashioned insight about the incompatibility of school and childbearing for women is not outdated. As they put it, “school enrollment's ability to forestall fertility appears as effective today as it was over half a century ago.” Primary school completion rates exceed 90% in most Latin American countries, but the secondary school completion rate did not exceed 60% until around 2010, and has not improved much since then. Secondary school usually has two phases, lower secondary and upper secondary (in the United States, we typically call these middle school and high school). More than 80% of Latin American children finish the lower secondary phase—the completion rate for lower secondary is closer to primary than upper secondary. Girls are about 14 years old when they finish lower secondary. Most teen mothers in Latin America completed school more than a year before their first birth. Mechanically, it is easy to see how one-third of Latin American young women could become teen mothers after dropping out of school: about 20% are done with school by age 14, and another 20% finish by age 18. 

What sets Latin America apart, then, is not that schoolgirls are getting pregnant at high rates, but rather that young women who do not go on to college or university (tertiary education) often embark on motherhood shortly after finishing school. This mechanical explanation points directly to the role of social stratification, or the combination of inequality and limited socioeconomic mobility. Those who continue beyond secondary education rarely become teen mothers, while a huge share of those who finish high school while still in their teens do get pregnant. Earlier research referred to “polarized reproduction” in the region because the class differences in age at first birth were more extreme than in other contexts. Instead of first births most commonly occurring in the mid-20s, there are two typical ages in Latin America: late teens/early 20s and late 20s/early 30s.

The combination of inequality and limited socioeconomic mobility explains persistently high teen fertility in Latin America where the average woman bears only 1.7 children.

Why are the typical ages of first motherhood more than a decade apart? Longer “incarceration” in school among the advantaged explains only a fraction of that gap. It thus seems probable that secondary education in the region does not change aspirations enough to warrant postponing motherhood. Education is an important means through which individuals gain a greater sense of control over their life, but the researchers refer to a number of Latin American studies in which adolescent mothers’ descriptions of their own fertility include themes like a lack of agency or control. Women from lower socioeconomic strata may correctly perceive that their prospects for upward mobility are low: they do not give up anything that they feel is within reach by not continuing in school or by becoming mothers earlier in life.

This leads me to the rather ironic conclusion that when the new research solved the demographic puzzle by separating education’s incarceration and aspirational affects, it found that the two were intertwined—both shaped by social stratification. The same girls who see little reason to pursue higher education because they are at the bottom of a social hierarchy that schooling is unlikely to help them escape experience fertility that is constrained for a shorter time by schooling’s incarceration effect and virtually untouched by its aspirational effect. 

Furthermore, socioeconomic returns from school diminish when education expands, as degrees become an expected job market credential rather than serving to distinguish those who have them. This would dissuade those lower in the socioeconomic hierarchy more than those who are better positioned to bear the costs of higher education. Social inequality matters for fertility patterns everywhere, but social stratification explains persistently high teen fertility in Latin America where the average woman bears only 1.7 children before reaching menopause.

Laurie DeRose is a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Catholic University of America, and Director of Research for the World Family Map Project.