https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/14/health/teen-pregnancy-early-death.html?unlocked_article_code=1.c00.4qTn.fhJWN-SuPjM-&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
A large analysis in Canada finds that teenagers who had babies were twice as likely to die before age 31.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2816198
The linked study is way more interesting
2/3 teen pregnancy end in abortion.
teen pregnancy may be a marker of adverse life experiences preceding and/or during the formative teen years. For example, there is a dose-response association of exposure to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)—such as sexual and emotional abuse, parental divorce or separation, or income decline9—with subsequent teen pregnancy,10,11 substance use,12 and suicide.13 ACEs are also associated with premature mortality.9,14,15
I do think this is a strong confounder, but very very interesting results
While I’m not an expert in anything vaguely related, I would bet that those “adverse life/childhood experiences” have more of a causal effect on lifespan than the abortions.
Yes, confounders are variables which influence the outcome in a causal model but can't be separated out
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“The younger the person was when they became pregnant, the greater their risk was of premature death,” said Dr. Joel G. Ray, an obstetric medicine specialist and epidemiologist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and the first author of the study.
The study made use of a provincial health insurance registry to analyze pregnancy outcomes among some 2.2 million teenagers in Ontario, Canada, including all girls who were 12 years old between April 1991 and March 2021.
Even after the researchers accounted for pre-existing health problems the girls may have had, and for income and education disparities, teenagers who carried pregnancies to term were more than twice as likely to suffer premature death later in life.
In a commentary accompanying the article, Elizabeth L. Cook, a scientist with Child Trends, a research organization focused on children and youth, noted that teen pregnancy may not be a causal factor in premature mortality.
A Finnish study reported in 2017 that women who had experienced a teen pregnancy were more likely to die prematurely as a result of suicide, alcohol-related causes, circulatory disease and car accidents.
Although the risks of pregnancy generally increase with age, pregnant adolescents are more likely than women in their 20s and 30s to develop pregnancy-related high blood pressure and a life-threatening condition called pre-eclampsia.
The original article contains 652 words, the summary contains 216 words. Saved 67%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
women who had experienced a teen pregnancy were more likely to die prematurely as a result of suicide, alcohol-related causes, circulatory disease and car accidents.
So half of these causes were basically self-induced (I would imagine very few of them are force-fed alcohol)... I wonder what the percentage breakdown is.