[gipper81]

I would have liked to have gotten a bar graph showing birth rates of women in their 20s as well but couldn't find it. This graph most certainly shows the impact of birth control and abortion in Europe.

[redgolum]

Does your graph represent the births to citizens and legal immigrants or everyone in the US? While the culture here is more child friendly (pedophilia is not legal or tolerated, as it is in the Netherlands), I have heard much of this growth is do to illegal immigration.

The trend in Europe has happened before. The Romans, and the ancient Greeks before them, both had drastically declining birthrates during the decline of their empires. Children became viewed as a burden, and child abandonment and abortion became very common.

[only1percent]

This graph shows the relative absence of an economic underclass in Europe. Both in Europe and the United States, teenage motherhood is the sole preserve of the poor and uneducated. There are proportionately more of them in the U.S.

Teenage motherhood is affected to an only small extent by the ease of access to abortion and contraception. The rates are massive in U.S. inner cities where most girls are at most a 20-minute $2 bus ride from a Planned Parenthood clinic, and are tiny in Ireland, where abortion requires a trip to England and contraception is hard to come by.