State Policy Determinants of Teenage Childbearing, 1979

This study was designed to identify and catalog state governmental policies that affect the teenage mother and to describe how those policies may influence teenage childbearing. The policies examined included: Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), prenatal care programs, Medicaid, food stamps, family planning services, age of consent laws, abortion services, and alternatives to childbearing. The outcomes of interest included teenage marriage, pregnancy, childbearing and abortion rates. Two sets of analyses were carried out in the original study -- one focusing on individual teenage females as the unit of analysis, and the other focusing on the incidence of teenage childbearing within each state or SMSA as a while.