The United States has higher rates of teen pregnancy, birth and abortion than in other Western industrialized countries. This is truly alarming and something that needs to be deal with. There were 71 pregnancies per 1,000 U.S. girls aged 15-19. In 2006, 7 percent of all teenage girls got pregnant, according to the report. While fewer black teenage girls got pregnant, closing a gap with Hispanic teens. But rates among both groups were still significantly higher than for white teens, the report said, and rates went up for all ethnic groups.
I understand that some people might say this is 2010 and why are we looking at data from 2006 but when it comes to data, it lags behind the years so this data is the latest data to count on until the data of 2007, 2008 and even 2009 becomes available. So it is important to look at this data and understand that perhaps all the talk about teen pregnancy going down is over and we are in a new era of fighting this like never before. I remember in 2008 when my father told me a young at his school had told him that nearly 100 or more girls in the 9th grade class are pregnant and this was before the Fall/Winter semester had ended. Nonetheless this is what we are dealing and this data shows that we must fight against to rise in teen pregnancy.
"We're not quite sure yet whether this is just a blip or whether it's the beginning of a longer upward trend," Larry Finer, Guttmacher's director for domestic research, said in a telephone interview. "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."
Regardless if the data is isolated or not, the fact that teen pregnancy climbed in 2006 showed be taken serious because 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 but they are not as effective on its own. As I have stated before, we need to teach real sex education that encourages abstinence as the best result to fight offer HIV, AIDS and other sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs) as well as to prevent pregnancy because if you are not having sex than you can’t get pregnant and if you are not indulging in any sexual activities of any kind than you can’t get a disease. However for those who do engage in it need to know that they need to protect themselves with birth control and condoms (men and women).
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. This is the step in the right direction but it is not enough because it is how we teach, where we teach and how we get personal with it that we will fight the rise in teen pregnancy. Our youth need us to know that we care if they get pregnant and we care if they indulge in sexual activities. So as a collective community we all have a responsibility to raise our youth so that teenage pregnancy doesn’t continue to rise. It is not just up to parents to teach our youth about the dangers and pitfalls of teenage pregnancy and how harder having a child while you are a teen can be than when you wait because it’s not as rosy as some teens think it is. Now is the time to win this battle and both liberals and conservatives should work together on this to win this battle so that we can win the war on our youth once and for all.
SAVE OUR YOUTH!
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