Teen Birth Rate Rises for First Time in 15 Years
 

congrats to Mississippi for finishing first with 68.4 births per 1,000 women ages 15-19 in 2006)

New Mexico and Texas rounded out the top three, but don't worry. i'm sure they're still at it.

my ol' Kentucky home was 68.8 per 1,000 in 1991, and 49.1 in 2005. that's -29 in 14 years. 2006 stats: 54.6.

my 1991-2005 stats come from the NVSR Vol. 56, #6 table on pg. 11

i like looking at charts n tables.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-w...d09c70df19.jpg

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Teen Birth Rate Rises for First Time in 15 Years http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/07.../teenbirth.htm

National Vital Statistics Report Volume 56, Number 6 http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr56/nvsr56_06.pdf

Hmm. I guess that abstinence only sex education policy was a big assed flop!

they took away condoms and this happens, i hope they start giving them out again

I blame Juno and Jamie Lynn, those hussies! :mad:

Oh, and that Bristol Palin, too!

BITCHES WANNA BANG!

MOSTLY IN THE DEEP SOUTH APPARENTLY

Finally! Mississippi tops a list for SOMETHING!

Charles Barkley: "I can't screw up Alabama [as Governor] - we're 48th in everything, and Mississippi and Arkansas aren't going anywhere."

Didn't Brandi Rae contribute to that statistic, or was sweet little DartmouthCornellYale born when she was 20?

Wait a minute...
Didn't we have a smack-down with an Ole Miss alum that had to quit school when she was 19 for getting pregnant?
Numbers don't lie.:)

I'm watching Tyra right now and they're talking about teens actively trying to get pregnant.

The one girl thought her boyfriend could support her and the kid because he makes $7,000/year.

Where, in Tautapoau, Himalayas with Alpacas?

Guess there ain't much to do in Mississippi or all those other states? IDK?

It is like those "have you ever read" jokes...

That's the angle I took. I'm also going to blame the economy. With all of the adults being forced to take the fast food, etc. jobs that teens normally take, the teens can't find jobs and find other ways to be (re)productive. I'm sure things are even worse in the smaller towns.

What gets me though, is that if you do have have some level of contraception and/or safer sex protection, you have a public health problem like a wild fire...

So, not just the babies, but the infections... HIV/AIDS did not suddenly end in this country... Mississippi as a state has the worst rate of new HIV/AIDS cases without that much HAART drugs. AND Mississippi's HIV/AIDS cases rival those seen in the poorest 3rd world countries in Africa... Meaning you are safer to catch HIV in some African countries than you are in Mississippi--at least you might get seen and have some form of treatment in some African countries...

I was psuedo-joking with my rationale. At the same time, I see your concern. HIV/AIDS and other STDs are a problem in the Atlanta area and the state of Georgia, too, but probably not as high as Mississippi. But that is truly a shame if there's a better chance for treatment in some African countries? This is still America right? ...But does that mean much of anything these days?

I'm not going to blame the economy because Mississippi, New Mexico, and other states are ALWAYS scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to this sort of thing. Even 3-4 years ago, when the economy was doing really well--teens in Mississippi were reproducing at a faster rate than NYC subway rats. Perhaps in their communities, single parenthood is seen as "okay." Maybe poverty isn't that big a deal. Maybe they don't read condom boxes, BCP instructions, or they don't listen to their teachers.

There is nothing that says that these teens are single parents. I would be interested to see statistics on how many of them are married. In Mississippi, female teens can get married at 15 with parental consent. That's shockingly low to me. These statistics also include 18 and 19 year olds. I would really want to see it more detailed by specific age and marital status.

LOL.
LOL!
LOLOLOLOL!

You mean the inner cities where the Dems live?

Do you know many married teenagers?

Almost everybody in my high school class who didn't go to college got married within a year or two of graduation and had a few kids by the time of our 5 year reunion, so yes, there are married teenagers out there.

I hunted down some statistics, although it was difficult to find. The best I can do is 2000 census data:
There were 891,000 married 15- to 19-year-olds in 2000, up from 598,000 in 1990, when married teens comprised 3.4 percent of all 15- to 19-year-olds. The increase came after a steady decline since 1950, when 9.5 percent of teens were married.
From http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/...in528755.shtml

I couldn't find any that broke it down by state though.

So it's rare?

All this really shows is that teens are more likely to give birth - it doesn't compare actual rates of teen PREGNANCY. Those numbers (while pretty much impossible to accurately collect) might be more evenly spread across state lines ...

This really made me laugh. Something about the use of "apparently."

This is actually a big improvement for Georgia in terms of relative rankings, I think. Back in the 90s I think we were typically one of the top three all the time.

And you know, no one took away the condoms, people. Even if your school had an abstinence only program funded by the feds, that doesn't actually prevent a different program from offering comprehensive sex ed. I bet you could count on one hand the number of schools who actually gave out condoms before who quit doing, if you could find any.

What I'm guessing this reflects is some sort of relaxation of fears about HIV in that age group. I think HIV scared a generation of teens to the point that sex without a condom was practically unthinkable, but I guess they've all grown up and there haven't been any high profile heterosexual infections lately.

And I think that what KSUviolet says applies some too. At my first job teaching, I had one girl who had her second baby before she was a senior in high school. The problem wasn't knowing where babies came from or having access to birth control. It was just that if she saw herself working in the local K-Mart distribution center all her life, it wasn't that big impediment to her plans to have a kid or two and she loved them.

This may sound racist and classist and I'll just take the heat, but I suspect that for the most part rates are steady for different demographic and economic groups across state lines. Some states are just blessed with more diverse populations that others. ETA: looking at more data, I've got to say, I'm probably wrong. I can't really tell though because for some states, I think the economic situation may explain a lot and I don't have data for that. The south must just be that much more fertile.

ETA:http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/2006/09/12/USTPstats.pdf
It's from 2006.
This has more info, even of the type that DSTren notes.

"Fifty percent or more of teenage pregnancies end in abortion in New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia."

Exactly. For example, in my community, almost everyone is college-bound (or headed to some form of higher ed) after HS. So having a baby is a pretty big impediment to that. It's also true that most of their parents are also college grads (or have some form of post-HS education), so that's what they see as the norm. Having a baby in HS or soon afterward is just not the norm.

In contrast, there are communities in which most girls aren't thinking college or higher ed after school. Their parents and friends had babies in or shortly after HS. They also didn't go to college or anything and just work at *insert local place in town where everybody works here* So having x number of kids and working at ______ is the norm.

4.5% of all teens in 2000 but it was on the rise from 1990. It surprised me that it was on the rise. The pregnancy rate was 6.84% in 2006. It's not enough information to make any assumptions, really. We don't know how much overlap there was between those groups.

I think it has a lot to do with class first, and then race. Even in poor areas (like Mississippi!), the teen pregnancy rate is probably split pretty evenly among black and white. When I was in HS, some girls got pregnant, but only the poorer ones--black and white--kept the kids. Part of it was that they probably figured that their parents, who were younger and less educated, "did fine," so why couldn't they do just as "well"?

Also, despite the fact that the Gloucester teen pregnancy pact was a hoax in that they didn't agree to get pregnant en masse, it's still an economically depressed town with a stark rich/poor divide. Those girls were all white, but they still didn't think they had any other options, so keeping a pregnancy was more palatable to them then it would have been to a girl on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Well, the heat and humidity does make a lot of things more sexy.

Let's hear it for abstinence-only sex education. :rolleyes:

The reality is, teenagers are going to have sex, no matter how often you tell them not to. So they need to be educated that, while abstinence is arguably best, if you do not choose abstinence, you should be using a condom. (Or a diaphragm, or the pill, or something. A condom is best because it also protects against STDs.)

It's also worth noting that seven of these ten states require parental consent, and an eighth (Georgia) requires parental notification, for a minor to get an abortion. If I had been unlucky enough to become pregnant at age 15 (unlikely as I wasn't sexually active back then, and if I had been, I would have insisted on a condom), I could have walked into any abortion clinic in New York and said, "I want an abortion." But if I had lived in Mississippi, where the consent of BOTH parents is required, my uber-religious pro-life parents would have prevented me from getting an abortion. I would have had to carry the pregnancy to term and then either place the child for adoption or wave bye-bye to a college education and a career.

I was shocked in my college Health class by the amount of people that thought condoms were 99% effective, that pulling out was about the same, and that didn't know how to probably use the pill (like some thought as long as you took it almost every day it would day, but that skipping a day wouldn't hurt anything). My high school health class was less than useless when it came to sex, but my parents educated me (though I was brought up in a strictly abstinence-only home with extremely Christian parents I was taught about condoms, the pill, etc. and how effective they were) by talking to me and sending me to a program in the area when I was in 5th or 6th grade. So I didn't understand how ignorant some people were. Also, pregnancy was a more important worry than STD's, even with people that had frequently changed partners and didn't use condoms.

I don't know if it isn't taught, if people just don't listen, or if it's the teen attitude of "it won't happen to me", but some people just don't get it. In my hometown teen pregnancy didn't happen, literally. (Or at least births didn't). Not one person had a baby the entire time I was there. I expected it to be a relatively uncommon occurrence in college as most people in college are there to achieve a degree and a job and realize that a baby will make those things more difficult to obtain. But I know a LOT of new moms. They've made the best of it and of course they love their kids, but their lives are harder now, and most don't have a father figure. I wish people were more careful.

I think differences in culture may influence this decision even more that the law itself. I think if you look at abortion rates by states, you don't see a big spike in the rates of abortion of women right over the age at which they can get abortions without parent consent. To me this suggest that the attitude about abortion (or maybe easy availability of abortion) may be different period, rather than the just the parent notification laws.

And going by personal experience with the couple of pregnant teens I've known, they knew where to get condoms or other forms of birth control, and they knew how people got pregnant. Some even knew from close friends exactly how difficult parenting was. That knowledge didn't information their behavior though. The fun of sex and the "it won't happen to me" thinking (as well as "it might be fun to have a kid" thinking in a couple of cases) override the formal instruction they've been giving.

That depends on what data you're looking at. I'm interested to see your sources. Mine say differently.

Stanley Henshaw studied the impacts of Mississippi's parental consent law when it went into effect in 1993. What he found was that fewer 17-year-olds were having abortions, but more 18-year-olds were having late-term abortions: the state's second-trimester abortion rate increased by 19%. This study was published in the May-June edition of Family Planning Perspectives journal.

Ted Joyce, Robert Kaestner and Silvie Coleman studied Texas's parental notification law after it went into effect in 2000 and came to a similar conclusion. Quoting the article, the parental notification law was "associated with increased birth rates and rates of abortion during the second trimester among a subgroup of minors who were 17.50 to 17.74 years of age at the time of conception." This article was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in March 2006.

I TOTALLY agree with this!

ITA! I think this is moreso it than anything else. No one ever thinks the screw up will happen to them because they are "better than that". :rolleyes: Teens know how pregnancy occurs and how to prevent it (whether through abstinence or via BC).

I wish it was true of just pregnant teens! I have a friend who's going to give birth in the next few weeks. She's my age, and her boyfriend is still in college. Ewwww! It's just a big mess...I don't get it. In college, my boyfriend and I were acutely aware of how much my getting pregnant would screw things up for both of us, so I wonder why they took that risk knowing that her career is temporarily derailed (she's in the same field as I, where you have to garner a certain number of work HOURS in order to be licensed), and his last months of college/first months of a career are not going to be as smooth as they would have been if they had just used a damn condom! I think she sees how much harder it's going to be for her than it is for our married friends who, while still got pregnant by accident, have the back-up of a larger apartment, more savings, and more work history to cushion the setback.

Totally off-topic, but I'm still skeeved out by it--and still kinda wasted from last night. I feel like this situation has made me a million times more vigilant about not getting pregnant!

http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/2006/09/12/USTPstats.pdf

It could completely be my not paying enough attention, but when I looked at the most recent data by state it didn't appear that if you worked out the percentage of pregnancies ending in abortion, there was much real difference for the 15-17 vs 18-19 groups. I didn't work out the percentages; I just kind of looked at a couple of numbers. At first, it looks like a huge jump, but then your realize that that many more 18-19 year olds got pregnant to begin with.

Maybe I'm just reading it wrong or maybe the pattern that existed as the laws went into effect didn't continue very long. There's a note at the bottom of one page about estimates for a state with incomplete data perhaps being inaccurate because girls affected by parental consent laws traveled to other states for abortions. When the laws were new, girls may have waited to turn 18. Perhaps later, people advised them to go to the closest state without notification laws.

Mississippi looks like it's about 14% for 15-17 and 16% for 18-19
Texas looks like it's 15% vs. 18%.

Again, this is if I understand what there numbers represent and read the columns correctly when I scrolled down to look at the state.

There's nothing racist or classist about the bolded statement.

Structurally: The South has a higher concentration of people from lower socioeconomic status and racial and ethnic minorities (which is correlated with lower socioeconomic status). As there is a "Bible Belt" there is also a "poverty belt" and a "black and brown belt."

Culturally: The rest can be explained through the lack of sex (and overall) education, the cultural acceptness of (premarital sex and) single motherhood in many communities, and as you mentioned the abortion-birth ratio. Perhaps abortion-birth ratio won't explain that much of the variation in teen births since some of the states may have significant teen abortions and births.

The above structural and cultural effects were long believed to be buffered by religiosity, traditionalism and "morality." Unfortunately, generally speaking, norms have changed and traditional social ties have declined.