A new survey of sex and abortion in America challenges conventional wisdom that poor women have more sex by showing that the nation’s richest single women have the most sex, but also the highest levels of abortion and contraception use, greatly curbing their birth rates.
The remarkable Brookings Institution study shines a light on why poor single women, those who live below the poverty line, have significantly more babies than the rich. It’s not that they are having more sex, it’s because they lack access to, or can’t afford contraception or abortion, said the study.
Brookings reviewed federal data of 3,885 single women, age 15-44, who are not trying to get pregnant and found that those with incomes at 400 percent or higher of the federal poverty rate of about $12,000 for a single person have the most sex by a smidge.
While the sex rate of all incomes is generally the same, the findings were revealing. For the study, Brookings said “a woman was characterized as being sexually active in the past year if she reported one or more opposite-sex partners.”
Sex percentage by income level:
— 71 percent for those with incomes 400 percent or more of the poverty level.
— 65.9 percent for those with incomes at 300 percent-400 percent of the poverty level.
— 65.3 percent at 200 percent-300 percent of the poverty level.
— 65.6 percent at 100 percent-200 percent of the poverty level.
— 69.9 percent for those below the poverty level.
The richest single women also had the highest rate of abortion, 31.9 percent versus 8.6 percent for the poorest.
Brookings also found that poor women were twice as likely to have had sex without protection compared to the richest women.
And the result is that the richest women got pregnant just 2.9 percent of the time compared to 9 percent for the poor, and that birthrate of the poor was five times that of the wealthiest.
Brookings suggested that if poor women were provided with the same rate of abortion and contraception, their births would be slashed. “We find that equalizing contraceptive use reduces the ratio of unintended births between affluent and poor women by half, and that equalizing abortion rates reduces the ratio by one-third,” said the authors.
“Sex is not the problem,” said the report. Income likely is, it concluded:
“Control of fertility varies widely between income groups. Most unmarried women are sexually active, regardless of income. But women with higher incomes are much more successful at ensuring that sex does not lead to an accidental baby. This almost certainly reflects their brighter economic and labor market prospects: simply put, they have more to lose from an unintended birth. Improving the economic and educational prospects of poorer women is therefore an important part of any strategy to reduce unintended birth rates. But there are more immediate solutions, too. Affluent women use contraception more frequently and more effectively, and there is a clear case for policies to help close this income gap, including increasing access to long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs). But access to affordable abortion also matters, and this is currently limited for many low-income women. There are of course strongly-held views on abortion, but it should be hard for anyone to accept such inequalities by income, especially when they are likely to reverberate across two or more generations. Abortion is a difficult choice, but it is not one that should be influenced by financial status.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
