For the first time since the early 1990s, overall rates of pregnancy and birth among teens has increased, according to a report released yesterday by the Guttmacher Institute. The pregnancy rate among girls aged 15 – 19 rose by 3 percent between 2005 and 2006, reflecting increases in teen birth and abortion rates of 4% and 1%, respectively. “It is too soon to tell whether the increase in the teen pregnancy rate between 2005 and 2006 is a short term fluctuation, a more lasting stabilization or the beginning of a significant new trend, any of which would be of great concern,” said Lawrence Finer, Guttmacher’s director of domestic research. The teen pregnancy rate declined 41% between its peak, in 1990 and 2005, which also resulted in declines in teen births and abortions. Researchers attribute the significant drop to better use of contraceptives among sexually active teens. This reversal in teen pregnancy rates coincides with the introduction of abstinence-only sexual education programs that prohibited the discussion of the benefits of contraception. The Obama Administration’s 2010 budget has eliminated funding for abstinence-only programs and shifted it to pregnancy prevention initiatives that are age-appropriate, medically accurate and evidence-based.
Read article here.
2 comments:
Ms. Griffin,
Surveys like this that seek to single out a single causality to the "increase" of teen pregnancy to the introduction of "abstinence only" education betrays an obvious bias in the research and overlooks several other equally, if not more, relevant factors. How about the impact of sexually-suggestive/explicit programming on T.V., in song lyrics and on the internet? What about the number of students that themselves come from homes where sexual abstinence is mocked, rather than modeled and reinforced?
But, beyond these common-sense factors, consider this... Would you champion a class or curriculum add-on that would teach "safe" drinking, smoking, recreational drug use? If we have learned NOTHING from the past 25 years of anti-smoking/anti-alcohol/anti-drug campaigns is that the most successful approach to educating youth about the dangers of engaging in these types of behaviors is to teach them "if you never start, then you never need to worry about quitting".
Why can't we take the same approach in the classroom and take steps to reinforce this message at home.
Ms. Griffin,
Teen pregnancy and the teen birth rate (TBR) rise and fall according to several social and economic dynamics.
The main ones are the adult birth rate (ABR), which teens follow lockstep, and the poverty rate. Today's poverty rate is the TBR in about 10 years.
The other dynamics include sex abuse, violent homes, lack of competing choices, educational failure, lack of reproductive care as an un-pregnant female, male abandonment, and the fact that having a child as a teen can be a good choice.
Preaching abstinence is another in a long line of ways adults sexually abuse kids, and will always be a shameful disgrace. It was designed to keep teen girls from having sex, not to keep them from getting pregnant.
In short Ms. Griffin, teen pregnancy is an adult-created problem, not a teen problem. Adults created it, adults drive it, and only adults can fix it.
Rick Machado
Public Speaker on Teen Pregnancy
Post a Comment