Losing Battle in Britain

Abstract

With the highest teen birth rate in Europe, the United Kingdom is anxiously seeking ways to stem the tide. But researchers say a program to reduce pregnancies among teens seems to have had the opposite effect. Scientists led by Meg Wiggins at the University of London studied how the Young People's Development Programme, which ran at 27 locations in England from 2004 to 2007, affected more than 2300 “at risk” 13- to 15-year-old boys and girls. They compared data on sexual behavior, drug and alcohol use, and school suspensions with statistics for students from 27 comparable areas. The after-school program offered 6 to 10 hours a week of tutoring, sex education, health services, art classes, and career counseling over a year. The results, reported last week in the British Medical Journal , showed “significantly” more pregnancies in the intervention group than in the comparison group: 16% versus 6%. Girls in the program also had sex earlier and were more likely to expect to be mothers by the age of 20. The program had no discernible effect on boys. The researchers suggest that girls might have been influenced by exposure to risky peers or even just by being labeled “at risk.” Curbing teen fertility is an uphill struggle, says evolutionary psychologist David Buss of the University of Texas, Austin: “Teen women today are simply doing what their maternal ancestors did over human evolutionary history.”