News Analysis
In 1986, an upstart public health researcher named Arline Geronimus challenged the conventional wisdom that condemned the alarming rise of inner-city teen pregnancies. While activist minister Jesse Jackson and health care leaders were decrying the crisis of “babies having babies” as a ghetto pathology, Ms. Geronimus contended that teenage pregnancy was a rational response to poverty in urban areas, where low-income black people have fewer healthy years before the onset of heart problems, diabetes, and other chronic conditions.
