Teen Pregnancy by the Numbers

Here’s some crazy news (h/t): U.S. teen birth rates have risen for the first time since 1991.

The birth rate among teenagers 15 to 19 in the United States rose 3 percent in 2006, according to a report issued Wednesday, the first such increase since 1991. The finding surprised scholars and fueled a debate about whether the Bush administration’s abstinence-only sexual education efforts are working.

The federal government spends $176 million annually on such programs. But a landmark study recently failed to demonstrate that they have any effect on delaying sexual activity among teenagers, and some studies suggest that they may actually increase pregnancy rates.

Those of you who have been paying attention will pause, like I did, and say: wait, didn’t we just hear that teen pregnancy and birth rates were at an all-time low? Yes, we did. Those numbers were for 2005. Now, the birth rate has not only bounced back up — it bounced back up for the first time in 15 years.

So what the hell happened? It raises a lot of interesting questions.

Teenage birth rates are driven by rates of sex, contraception and abortion. In the 1990s, teenage sex rates dropped and condom use rose because teenagers were scared of AIDS, said Dr. John S. Santelli, chairman of the department of population and family health at Columbia University.

But recent advances in AIDS treatments have lowered concerns about the disease, and AIDS education efforts, which emphasized abstinence and condom use, have flagged.

Perhaps as a result, teenage sex rates have risen since 2001 and condom use has dropped since 2003. Abortion rates have held steady for a decade, although numbers from 2005 and 2006 are not available.

Kristin A. Moore, a senior scholar at Child Trends, a nonprofit children’s research organization, said the increase in the teenage birth rate was particularly alarming because even the 2005 rate was far higher than that in other industrialized countries.

As the numbers are for birth rates only, and not for pregnancy rates, it seems to me that there are three possible factors that could cause the increase, either alone or in some combination: more teens are having sex, fewer sexually active teens are using contraception, and fewer pregnant teens are having abortions.

We know that the first factor is true, and since condom rates are down, the second factor is at least partially true. There are no numbers on abortion, yet, though I’m interested to see them once they’re available. So, what the hell is going on? My first inclination is to blame abstinence-only education. The rates of teen sex and condom use bear this out — the numbers started getting worse as Bush’s policies went into place. But that doesn’t explain why it took so long for the birth increase to occur, and why actual pregnancy rates were also going down.

My best guess is this: if teen sex rates were up, condom use was down but teen pregnancy/birth rates were also dropping, either teens are getting less fertile and we need to check the drinking water, or more teens were using other types of contraception. The most recent numbers I could find were from 2002, and they do indeed show that better teen contraception use was responsible for declining teen pregnancy rates. We also know that at the same time, the number of teens who received formal contraception instruction was dropping. Eventually, those two simultaneous facts had to crash into each other. If the number of teens using the pill/patch, etc. has recently dropped, it would certainly explain the birth rate going up. And we have to remember that it’s recently in vogue for abstinence-only education to say not only that condoms don’t work, but that other types of contraception don’t, either. State anti-choice legislation has also been on the rise, which means that access to both contraception and abortion are declining in many areas. But again, there doesn’t seem to be any data on whether or not a correlation exists.

The Times article also tells us that the rates climbed most among black teens. What caused the disparity –worse education, economic factors driving more teens to purposely become mothers, a lack of access to contraception and abortion services — it doesn’t say, nor is it probably known. But in one way or another, it seems that just about any increased health issue in America affects African-Americans the most. It’s sad that we couldn’t have expected this to be an exception.

What are your thoughts?

Tagged as: Bush