Highlights from the most recent edition of the Cascadia Scorecard.

The score: 12 years behind targets.

The trend: Recent uptick, but little change overall from the early 1980s.

Soundbite: More than one-third of all births in the Northwest states stem from unintended pregnancies.

Picture it
Chart: Teen birthrates in the Northwest
Map: Family size in the Northwest

This year’s results at a glance

• Cascadia’s gradual, decades-long shift toward smaller families that come later in life has slowed.
  
• In 2005, the last complete year for which data are available, average family size remained essentially stable at 1.8 children.
  
• Despite this slowing, the region’s fertility patterns—which are both signals of women’s status and harbingers of environmental impact—are close to the international models of Sweden and the Netherlands, where women’s and children’s well-being is high.
• To make progress on this indicator, Cascadia can reduce the stubbornly high rates of births from unintended pregnancies, particularly in the Northwest states.
  

This year’s results in detail

Births among young women declined more slowly in 2005 than in other recent years. For the third year running, teen birthrates set a record low, though they declined less than in any year of the last decade.

All parts of the region except Oregon contributed to this decrease and, as in prior years, British Columbia led the way.

Today, the province’s teen birthrates are one-third the average for the Northwest states. Births among women in their early twenties are also diminishing throughout Cascadia, while births among women in their thirties and forties are slowly rising.

Cascadia’s shift toward smaller, later families is far from complete. Teen births in the Northwest states are twice as common as in the Netherlands.

And more than one-third of all births (as well as virtually all abortions) in the Northwest states stem from unintended pregnancies—those that are earlier than desired or not desired at all.

One likely explanation came to light in a Guttmacher Institute study in mid-2006. Nationwide US data show that, at least from 1994 to 2001, unintended pregnancy rates jumped 29 percent among poor women, as their access to publicly supported family-planning services and private medical insurance shrank. Meanwhile, unintended pregnancy rates dropped 20 percent among middle- and upper-class women.

Solutions: Make every child wanted

Preventing unintended pregnancies is a critical goal that can unite Cascadians with diverse values, because prevention brings compounding benefits: it prevents abortions and it leads to healthier children. Children conceived intentionally receive better prenatal care and are less likely to have dangerously low weights at birth or to die in infancy, and are less likely to endure abuse and neglect.

Public policies in Canada have helped yield lower rates of poverty and inequality than in the Northwest states; in addition, comprehensive access to medical care, including reproductive-health care, and ready access to contraception and abortion services without stigma have likely contributed to British Columbia’s more-rapid progress toward small, planned families.

Expanding insurance coverage for prescription contraceptives would prevent thousands of unplanned pregnancies each year.

More information:
Cascadia Scorecard 2007 sources
Cascadia Scorecard 2007 press kit

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