Increase in Teenage Pregnancy Rate

The last couple of days it seems that teenage pregnancy has been on the media’s brain. In fact the movie based on the “pregnancy pact” where a group of female teenagers made a pact to all get pregnant at the same time so they could raise their children together is about to preview sometime this month. I suppose for myself teenage pregnancy has been on the brain since recently reconnecting with an old friend who was pregnant in her teens. It seems with all of the initiatives to combat teenage pregnancy there would be a steady decline in the teenage pregnancy rate; however, the opposite seems to have occurred. For the first time in 10 years, in 2006 the teenage pregnancy rate actually rose.

According to data from the Guttmacher Institute, the teenage pregnancy rate rose approximately three percent that year which also included an overall increase in births of four percent and an accompanying increase in rate of abortions of one percent. Overall, of all the Western industrialized countries, the United States has highest rates of all three (teenage pregnancy, births and abortions). The data shows that per every thousand girls between the ages of fifteen and nineteen in 2006, there were 71 pregnancies. The rates were highest for black and Hispanic teenage girls in comparison to white teenage girls.

Larry Finer, the director for domestic research at the Guttmacher Institute, states, “We’re not quite sure yet whether this is just a blip or whether it’s the beginning of a longer upward trend. It’s interesting to note that this flattening out of the rate and the increase in the rate is happening at the same time that we’ve seen substantial increases in funding for abstinence-only programs. We do know that when we saw the big decline in the ’90s, that a lot of that decline was due to improved contraceptive use among teens.” Since the arrival of the Obama administration, the debate between abstinence-only programs and abstinence-plus programs (those programs that promote abstinence but also include education on contraceptives and sexually transmitted diseases) has greatly intensified.

Since the late 1990s, the federal government has allocated over one billion dollars to these abstinence-only programs. These types of programs are strongly supported by conservatives who feel any education about contraceptives should be kept out of schools. In contrast, when the Obama administration took over, the 2010 federal budget got rid of all funds allocated to these abstinence-only programs and instead redistributed them to those initiatives that promote abstinence in addition to “medically accurate and age-appropriate” information. Those states that had the lowest teenager pregnancy rates include Vermont, Minnesota, North Dakota, Maine and New Hampshire. The state with the highest pregnancy rate amongst teenagers was New Mexico at nine percent. Texas, Nevada, Mississippi and Arizona trailed closely behind.