Free Republic

The staff of TeenWise, a Minneapolis-based non-profit, crunched the numbers for its annual report on Minnesota teenagers' sexual health. Their calculations seemed to show something unbelievable: the state's teen birth rate had a double-digit decline between 2009 and 2010. That seemed impossible. Just three years earlier, in 2007, Minnesota's teen birth rate had increased by 1.4 percent; nationally it had increased by 3 percent in 2006. How could the rate then fall so steeply and so quickly? "We ran the data, and we figured it was a mistake," said Judith Kahn, TeenWise's executive director. "Then, it looked like everybody had...

The rate of teen pregnancy in the United States has fallen dramatically over the last two decades -- 52 percent -- though in the developed world, it still remains the highest. In 2008, the last year for which in-depth data are available, nearly 750,000 young women under 20 became pregnant, including some 236,000 teenage girls ages 15-17. The overwhelming majority of them were unmarried. The good news is that the numbers of teen pregnancies have declined so significantly for two reasons: First, fewer teens are having sex and second, more teens who are sexually active are using birth control. More...

Like the proverbial monkey typing for infinity and getting Shakespeare, Mayor Bloomberg's obsession with reforming New Yorkers' health has finally produced a brilliant ad campaign. Posters are popping up in subway stations and bus stops giving statistics about teen pregnancy that show cute little kids saying things like, "Honestly, Mom ... chances are he won't stay with you. What happens to me?" and "I'm twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen." (Based on a recent CBS report, the kid could add, "Then again, I'm in the New York City public school system,...

<p>STORM LAKE, Iowa (AP) — In her dozen years as manager of a Planned Parenthood clinic in small-town Iowa, Sue Thayer thought she had seen it all — pickets, threats and, locked away in a file cabinet, the records of women with problems she never imagined. But nothing comes close to the furor that has erupted in the months since the sheriff demanded to see some of those files in hopes of solving the gruesome death of a newborn.</p>