Posted on 12/12/2007 7:51:30 AM PST by madprof98
First, violent crime. Now, teen birth rates.
After declining for more than a decade, births to unmarried teenagers suddenly increased 3 percent among 15- to 19-year-old girls between 2005 and 2006, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Like the uptick in violent crime, this could signal a worrisome trend —- another sign that undesirable social phenomena the nation struggled to curb in the 1990s have begun to ooze back up through the sewer grate. The one-year increase in births to teen moms could be an anomaly. Maybe the numbers for 2007 will show another decline, as adolescent girls stick to their abstinence pledges or remember to use contraceptives. Maybe the 3 percent increase is just a slight bump in the long road toward ending adolescent motherhood.
But the figures are troubling because they come after years of national folly, including a White House strategy of endorsing and funding abstinence-only education. President Bush and other social conservatives have long rejected giving adolescents information about contraception while also encouraging abstinence. They insist that teaching kids to rely on chastity will prevent sexual experimentation.
That never made much sense, given a culture that uses sex to sell everything from toothpaste to T-shirts. Adolescents are hardly immune to those continuous cultural signals, pumped through music, videos and youth-oriented TV shows such as Fox's long-running drama, "The O.C." Over the last couple of years, a raft of studies has given scientific weight to the nagging suspicion that "abstinence only" education is a dud.
In 2005 and 2006, researchers surveyed 2,000 teenagers in two rural and two urban communities. They found that students who had had abstinence-only education were just as likely to have sex as a control group of teens who did not receive the instruction. Among sexually active teens in both groups, the average age of the start of sexual activity was just shy of 15. A majority of those had two or more partners, they said. Just 23 percent reported always using condoms.
The recent rise in teen births stands in stark contrast to more than a decade of decline. Between 1991 and 2005, the rate of births to females aged 15-19 plummeted by 34 percent, from a high of 61.8 births per 1,000 in 1991 to 40.5 live births per 1,000 females in that age bracket in 2005.
And that stunning drop was by no means mere coincidence. Activists and community volunteers who genuinely wanted to curb adolescent pregnancy —- as opposed to those who just wanted to rail against abortion and inflict their rigid moral codes on others —- worked hard to find programs that actually worked. They formed clubs for teen girls. They wrote scripts for role-playing, teaching teenagers how to say "no" to sex. (Those activists, too, believe in abstinence, but they're not naive about its utility.)
High school teachers assigned homework in which students spent a week caring for crying, fidgeting, diaper-wetting baby dolls, so adolescents would learn how difficult and demanding infants can be. They handed out contraceptives, including Depo-Provera, an injection that proved effective with teenaged girls who were unlikely to remember daily pills.
Through the 1990s, that overlapping network of programs was supported and partially funded by the Clinton White House, which believed in a pragmatic response to social problems. While President Clinton supported a woman's right to choose, he also said abortions should be "safe, legal and rare." The same pragmatism brought federal support for crime prevention efforts, including federal funds for hiring police officers.
By contrast, the Bush White House has turned back to a conservative ideology that mocks government as the source of problems —- unless taxpayer funds can be used to further far-right objectives. So Depo-Provera is out, but abstinence pledges are in.
Maybe it's just coincidence that more adolescent girls are having babies. More likely, it's the inevitable result of a raft of foolish policies.
> Cynthia Tucker is the editorial page editor. Her column appears Wednesdays and Sundays.
cynthia@ajc.com
To the leftists, telling teens to keep it in their pants is "inflicting a rigid moral code on others."
What an idiot. The only thing that directly causes teen births is teen sex.
LOL, now the Libs are blaming their own social irresponsibility on Bush.
But hey, why stop with sex? Bush continues U.S. policies against illegal drugs...so that forces teens to drink more or procure prescription medications to satisfy their addictions. lol
To quote my Jewish friends...oy vey.
NATURAL
consequences are "inflicting rigid moral codes on others".
Maybe teen pregnancy went down in the ‘90’s because a certain president made oral sex popular and it wasn’t even called sex.
Maybe, but
THROAT GONORHEA
cases skyrocketted.
Whats revealing is what happens if you exclude African Americans from this catagory and gun related crimes.
Suddenly, there isn’t much of a problem.
Teenage girls often have babies fathered by teenage boys. LOL
The sex positive agenda crowd undermines abstinence only programs. They seek to see everyone sexually active (with a “Just Say Yes” campaign online, a new report to say that “abstinence” can lead to sexual health problems later in life, and a mindset that abstinence is unhealthy because it is a supression of sexual desires).
We’ve gone from 8 years of “oral sex is not sex” and a condom laden Christmas tree in the White House. The kids who grew up in that culture are the ones who are having kids today.
The boat will not change course overnight.
There are quite a few fathered by those over 18. But Planned Parenthood does their best to destroy all evidence of such relationships.
How many adolescents are immigrants dropping an anchor baby off for citizenship?
Their Fox bashing belies an “untruth”, they’ve long claimed that Fox is “conservative”. Fox Broadcasting programming is not conservative. Fox News is not conservative either, NewsCorp executives endorsed John Kerry.
She can create this nonsense out of the clear blue without batting an eye.
“Whats revealing is what happens if you exclude African Americans from this catagory and gun related crimes.”
Hey!! You can’t say that!!!
Even if it’s true, you can’t say that!!!!
Get with the program, man!
One of the stupidest positions ever formulated by a purportedly intelligent person. If abortion is not wrong, why does the frequency need to be limited? We don't limit the instances of cyst excision. We don't limit the frequency of tooth replacement. In the liberal world, abortion is just another medical procedure - and we don't ask that other medical procedures be "rare."
That’s more true than people realize. Illegitimacy rates among hispanics are skyrocketing, as girls realize that having a baby here is a free ticket to all kinds of goodies. They’re learning what the inner city african american communities learned from Johnson’s great society: unwed mother is a good career move.
I’m a vet, I’ll say what I wish, when the mood strikes me.
(I know the point you are making)
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