Early adolescent childbearing: a changing  morbidity?
Statistics on births and abortions in Monroe County, New York were analyzed for the years 1967 through 1978, with special attention to the proportion of infants born weighing less than 2501 g to mothers less than 14 years of age. For that age group, there was an overall increase in low-birth-weight infants from 12.5% to 16.2% of live births. The nonwhite younger adolescents experienced widely fluctuating changes in the proportion of low-birth-weight infants from year to year, with a slight overall increase in the 12 year interval; the white younger adolescents exhibited a steady dramatic increase from 9.1% to 19.2% of live births. Although these changes whether for single year pairs or for grouped years, have not reached statistical significance, we hypothesize that this trend is the result of use of abortion among young adolescents.
D000029:Abortion, Legal / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001741:Black or African American; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007230:Infant, Low Birth Weight; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D009518:New York; D011247:Pregnancy; D011253:Pregnancy in Adolescence; D044465:White People