Why are teen pregnancies on the rise?
Thu Dec 06, 2007 at 12:57:55 PM PDT
Some Kossack with special knowledge will probably cover this story better than me but I've been kind of sad all day since hearing this. Newsweek reports that
On Wednesday the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the teen birth rate in the United States increased in 2006 for the first time in 14 years,
The change in numbers is definitive.
Between 2005 and 2006, the teen birth rate rose from 40.5 to 41.9 live births per 1,000 Americans aged 15 to 19. The increase was highest among black teens, at 5 percent. Hispanic teens had a 2 percent increase, and non-Hispanic white teens were in the middle at 3 percent. Until this year the teen birth rate had been decreasing steadily from its all-time peak in 1991.
For the most part, there seems to be a consensus in this country that teen-aged women probably shouldn't be having babies. The babies and mothers are at increased physical risk. They are far more likely to end up living in poverty. There are higher incidences of abuse. The list of bad outcomes is long and pretty much includes most, if not all, bad things. So most people, when they hear this statistic ask 'Why?'
Newsweek talked to Heather Boonstra, Senior public policy associate at Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health think tank.
NEWSWEEK: Why do you think the teen birth rate is increasing again?
Heather Boonstra: We don't know entirely. You can't draw a straight line between whether this in truth indicates that more of these births are wanted or unwanted, whether the pregnancy rate has gone up and therefore the birth rate has gone up, or whether it means fewer young people are turning to abortion and more are giving birth instead. It may be part of a larger trend, or it may be just a blip.
If it's not just a blip, if it's real, why?
Over the time period when this group of young people has come of age, we have been funneling our federal dollars into abstinence-only programs. Since 1996 we've spent $1.5 billion on abstinence-only until-marriage programs, between state and federal dollars. If these programs talk about contraception, they only talk about it in terms of its failure rates. That is a trend we can point to. Whether or not that has impacted these rates, we don't know that. The only federal program for sex education is abstinence-only until-marriage. It's really accelerated since 2000-1. That's about the time the Bush administration came into office. They really have seen abstinence as the answer to teen pregnancy and teen birth and also to STD rates among teens. They would say that abstinence—if practiced perfectly, of course—is 100 percent effective in preventing teen birth such as this. We know that abstinence until marriage is not the norm in the United States ... Very few young people are sexually active by age 15, but by age 20, 70 percent of young people are sexually active. The challenge we have had as a nation is encouraging young people to delay as long as they can because that is a protective behavior, but we also need to prepare young people for that time when they will become sexually active to prevent unintended pregnancies.
So. We may have a blip. Or maybe these girls have all decided to start having babies. Or, well here's one thing that's different--we don't teach them how to avoid pregnancy anymore!! Could that be it? We don't teach our children how to avoid pregnancy and now our children don't know how to avoid pregnancy. Could we be onto something here?
Things are really, really tough for 15-16-17 year old girls with babies. My heart breaks for them but also rages against this President and these Republican fools who want to impose their public version of morality (because we know it's not the personal/private version for many of them) on the public regardless of the consequences, regardless of who gets hurt.
We have a lot of work to do to get this place straightened out.
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