The Not-So-Good News about Teenage Pregnancy

Abstract

Over the past few decades there has been a significant reduction overall in both pregnancy and childbearing among adolescents in the United States. Since the most recent peak of the early 1990s, the rate of pregnancy per 1,000 girls aged 15– 19 dropped from about 116.9 to 67.8 and the birthrate from 61.8 to 31.3 (the exact rates reported depending upon the data source). These dramatic declines of 42 and 49 % respectively occurred more or less steadily, and represent unequivocally good news. The downward trends occurred among teens in all racial and ethnic groups, of all ages, and in all states, to their current historic lows. Though the overall teen birth rate in the U.S. is nearly twice that of the next highest among developed nations, the U.K., the consistency of these positive trends over time and across various socio-demographic groups suggests that the tide of increased high-risk sexual activity among everyounger girls and boys has been stemmed. However, not all the news is good. Despite within-group declines, about half of all Latinas and black girls will become pregnant at least once before age 20, compared to 19 % of whites. Births to teens in rural counties are now almost 30 % higher than in urban or suburban communities and account for about 20 % of all births to teens. There also has been recent recognition of high levels of risky sexual activity among girls in foster care, who are twice as likely to give birth as those in the general population of teens. Preventing pregnancy among many of these adolescents—such as the young woman above whose early sexual initiation and motherhood resulted from fear of incest– and for whom the costs to the larger society are the highest, may prove to be extraordinarily difficult. In other words, as Sarah Brown, the Director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy observed, we may already have achieved the “easy wins” in bringing down rates of pregnancy and childbearing among American youth.