Sadly, more teen pregnancies generally means more teen abortions.
And, according to a report from the Massachusetts Family Institute, fatherless teen-age girls are five to seven times more likely to become pregnant than those who have a father in the home.
That is startling, and it’s troubling. It seems to indicate that one way to reduce the number of abortions that occur in Massachusetts and elsewhere across the globe is to promote two-parent families with a father and mother living in the home with their children.
While the report does not directly address abortions, it says the teen pregnancy rate is substantially higher in Bay State municipalities that have high fatherlessness rates compared to those where two-parent households are the norm.
The report states that 63 percent of children in Springfield live in single-parent households — which in the vast majority of cases means a mother but no father. In New Bedford, the figure is 56 percent.
This excerpt from the report shows the results:
… in communities where marriage is in decline, the damaging effects of multigenerational fatherlessness are the most ominous. Rates of birth to teen mothers are far higher in Massachusetts cities with high proportions of single-parent families than in cities with relatively low concentrations of single-parent families.
For example, in Springfield in 2019, there were 28 teen births per 1,000 women aged 15-19 in the city’s population, whereas, in Waltham, where more than three-quarters of children are in homes with married parents, there were 5 teen births per 1,000 young women in the same age range. In New Bedford in the same year, there were 27 teen births per 1,000 young women. In Lawrence there were 33 per 1,000 young women, but only 9 in Revere, where the rate of fatherlessness is closer to one in four
Given that most teens do not set out to become pregnant, we can assume most of these pregnancies are unplanned pregnancies. And, unfortunately, women abort unplanned pregnancies at shockingly high rates; the Guttmacher Institute says that 61 percent of unintended pregnancies end in abortions.
All of that is to say: reducing unplanned pregnancies is a way to reduce teen abortions and teen births by avoiding those two scenarios in the first place. And when a father is present in the home, teens are far more likely to avoid that unfortunate situation.
The teens who choose life deserve immense credit for doing what is right when it would have been easier to end their child’s life. However, we should not pretend this is an ideal circumstance for anyone involved.
So on top of reducing childhood poverty, fathers save innocent lives from being slaughtered — which goes to show how valuable they are to our communities.
The report, Fatherlessness in Massachusetts: The Economic and Social Costs To Our Commonwealth, was published in June 2023. It can be read here.
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(Courtesy of Wikimedia) 
