Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Gee... imagine that!

Teen pregnancy rate up after 10-year decline

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. teen pregnancy rate rose in 2006 for the first time in more than a decade, reversing a long slide, a U.S. think tank reported on Tuesday.

The overall teen pregnancy rate was up 3 percent in 2006, with a 4 percent rise in the rate of births and a 1 percent rise in the rate of abortions, according to the report by the Guttmacher Institute.

[snip]

"It's interesting to note that this flattening out of the rate and the increase in the rate is happening at the same time that we've seen substantial increases in funding for abstinence-only programs," Finer said.

"We do know that when we saw the big decline in the '90s, that a lot of that decline was due to improved contraceptive use among teens."

The abstinence-only programs, backed by many social conservatives who oppose the teaching of contraception methods to teenagers in U.S. schools, received about $1.3 billion in federal funds since the late 1990s.

The Obama administration's 2010 budget eliminated spending for abstinence-only, shifting funds to pregnancy prevention education that include abstinence along with "medically accurate and age-appropriate" information.
Can we please now admit that abstinence only education doesn't work and be done with it?

2 comments:

Steve Bates said...

When it comes to preventing pregnancy, "the audacity of hope" is not a plan.

Twenty years ago, the local Planned Parenthood became my first contract client when I started my tiny business. I felt pretty good about that, from that day forward, until GeeDubya Bush... and then Barack Obama... kicked the props from under everything I accomplished in those 20 years. And it appears it isn't coming back. Obama has at best stopped the slide into oblivion, but for many young women it's too little, too late.

I want a do-over...

ellroon said...

I hear you, Steve and thank you for your work with Planned Parenthood.

As a parent I have inundated my children with information about sex to the point where they cut me off and tell me in an exasperated tone that they've heard it before. They've been a conduit of information to their friends for which I am very grateful.

Nothing is sadder than kids who follow their natural urges without awareness of the consequences and then impact the rest of their lives with an unplanned pregnancy.

Why would any parent stand by and let that happen? How could ANY parent allow that to occur?