JACKSON - Mississippi has the nation's highest teen pregnancy rate and a new study shows the economic impact is equally steep.
More than 46 percent of all Mississippi children born in 2001 were born to unmarried women. One-third of those mothers were teenagers.
"The current annual cost to Mississippi for teen births is over $540 million," said Pete Walley, director of Mississippi's Bureau for Long Range Economic Planning.
"We based our methodology on a California Public Health Institute study where researchers totaled the cost of Medicaid, food stamps and aid to families with dependent children," Walley said. "Then by examining government records to see how many children of teen mothers are in remedial education or juvenile detention centers, you can gauge additional costs."
The last year Mississippi statistics were available was 2001. Walley calculated the direct cost to Mississippi taxpayers was $230 million. Back in 1995, the state Department of Health calculated that the cost of teen pregnancy to Mississippi taxpayers was $107 million.
The concrete costs that Walley calculated don't encompass nebulous but critical factors like the lower levels of educational attainment and lower incomes that the California study tracked among children of unwed teen mothers.
Walley's bureau works under the auspices of the Institutions of Higher Learning, commonly known as the College Board.
The bureau's research is one way Mississippi fulfills a legislative mandate to craft a 20-year economic development plan.
Many Mississippians were surprised to learn that Walley's bureau was scrutinizing data that doesn't involve trends in heavy industry or agriculture. But Walley sees the research as critical and natural. Mississippi will follow the national job trend that bestows the highest paying work on people skilled at intellectual rather than manual labor.
"To put it in economic terms, the 42,000 children born here last year are the feed stock of Mississippi," Walley said. "Not that many new people emigrate to the state so the future will be made by children born here."
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