Decodedc

A staggering number of young women are having babies today who say they didn’t mean to get pregnant. New statistics from the Brookings Institution show that, among American women under age 30, more than 70% of pregnancies are unintended. In her new book, “Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage,” Brookings fellow Isabel Sawhill tackles the hot-button issues of poverty, contraception and having children out of wedlock. DecodeDC host Andrea Seabrook talked to her for our latest podcast. Here’s an edited excerpt from their conversation: Andrea Seabrook: You have a couple of different prescriptions for what the government should do. One seems to focus on the fertility of women, that women who want to make it into the middle class or to break this cycle, should be on long-term birth control. Tell me a little bit about that idea. Isabel Sawhill: Right now, the amount of unintended and unwanted pregnancies we have in the United States is enormous. Fifty percent of all pregnancies in the