TEEN PREGNANCY RATES UP

all her fault?
In my social issues class, my students can pick their own final research topics and I've been struck, this past semester especially, how much interest there is around teenage pregnancy (only homelessless comes close in popularity of topic). The bulk of that interest focuses on teenage pregnancy in the Latina community specifically - rates are significantly higher amongst teenage Latinas than it is for any other major ethnic group - but it looks like it's really a national trend these days.

A major report came out this week that says that rates of teenage pregnancy have increased in recent years, especially the last two, reversing a huge, 30%+ slide that began since the early 1990s. In the most recent year analyzed (2006-7), rates in over half the states increased, especially in the South.

As usual with these kind of studies - it's one thing so see the data, it's an entirely other thing to try to explain it and so far, most of the analysis has been strictly armchair. This is from USA Today's article:

rates have increased so widely isn't easy. Some blame a more sexualized culture and greater acceptance of births to unmarried women. Others say abstinence-only sex education and a possible de-emphasis on birth control may play a part. And just where abortion fits into the puzzle won't be known until late this year or early in 2010, when 2006 abortion data will become available from the New York City-based Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit that has been tracking abortions since 1974. Government abortion statistics are based on voluntary state reports and do not include every state.

Sarah Brown, CEO of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, says she is less inclined to believe abortion is driving higher teen birth rates and suggests that increases in high-profile unmarried births in Hollywood, movies and even politics is a significant factor for impressionable teens.

"In the last couple of years, we had Jamie Lynn Spears. We had Juno and we had Bristol Palin. Those three were in 2007 and 2008 and not in 2005 to 2006, but they point to that phenomenon," she says.

I'm not going to say popular culture doesn't have an impact but I always want to roll my eyes at the suggestion that a few high-profile pregnancies are really that influential. Maybe that's more because I tend to find too much put on pop culture, i.e. "Blame Juno! Blame Britney/Jamie!" which can be a red herring to avoid tackling some more difficult questions around public policy, family values, etc.

That said, I don't have a better explanation either. As my students have suggested through their research, in the Latino community, it's a combination of family and religious values (Catholicism and machismo, for example) and structural forces, such as the proportionate lack of family planning resources available in many Latino neighborhoods.

Also, I couldn't help but think of Margaret Talbot's fascinating "Red Sex, Blue Sex" article from the New Yorker last winter where she explains why teenage pregnancy rates are much higher in more socially conservative areas than liberal ones, despite the latter having more open-minded perspectives on sex in general. The key difference is really one influenced less by politics and more by class: liberal families tend to be more middle class and tend to teach their kids that teenage pregnancy comes with a heavy price in terms of holding people back from pursuing college or careers. In contrast, in socially conservative families closer lower down the class ladder, the actual impact of pregnancy may not be as severe since these are teens whose future prospects would have been limited by other factors, regardless of having to raise children. In other words, though sex may be stigmatized more in conservative areas, pregnancy is not. In liberal areas, the reverse is true. It's an interesting, qualitative argument to bring into the mix of thinking about this new bump (no pun intended) in the pregnancy rate.

And of course, there will be those who want to blame abstinence-only programs for failing to teach kids how to responsibly use birth control. Some recent studies paint a mixed picture of that. Judy Rosenbaum's whose recent John Hopkins' study has made a splash. There, she looks at a general body of teenagers who come from socially conservative communities, and then compares rates of sex and birth control use amongst those who take "virginity pledges" and those who don't. In her study, which has made quite a recent splash, the findings suggest that virginity pledges have no impact on when people have sex and furthermore, pledgers are less likely to use condoms once they do start having sex, thus increasing the possibility of pregnancy. That said, her study also found that most people first have sex around 21, which, if accurate, would age them out of the "teenage" demographic which this more recent NCHS study looked at.

However, contradicting some of Rosenbaum's study is another recent project, from the RAND Corporation, which found that amongst virginity pledgers, there's no difference in their rate of condom usage compared to non-pledgers. Their methodology was different from Rosenbaum's however - she crunched numbers based on federal health stats, whereas Steve Martino from Rand lead a team that did survey and interview research with randomly selected youth. (Martino's study did note, importantly, that condom use was lower for pledgers having sex for the first time compared to non-pledgers and though condom use quickly caught up between the two groups, as Murphy's Law tells us - the first time you have sex often seems like the perfect time to get pregnant.

In any case, I'll be curious to see how future studies try to explain this uptick in teenage pregnancy and what kinds of social policies will get proposed to address it.

--O.W.