Teen birth rate up for first time in 15 years

After years of decline, the teen birth rate rose in 2006 for the first time since 1991, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported in December.

Along with this announcement, the film Juno, a comedy confronting the realities of teen pregnancy, was released, and 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears announced her pregnancy, thus putting the issue of teen pregnancy and sex education back in the spotlight.

The report, compiled by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, shows that while there was a slight decrease in live births to girls ages 10-14, rates for teens ages 15-19 increased by about 3 percent, from about 40 live births per 1,000 in 2005 to nearly 42 per 1,000 in 2006. The rate of live births to females age 20 years and younger remained 8.3 percent in Washington state, but increased from 10.2 percent to 10.4 in the United States as a whole.

“It’s way too early to know if this is the start of a new trend,” said Stephanie Ventura, director of the Reproductive Statistics Branch at the CDC, in a press release. “But given the long-term progress we’ve witnessed, this change is notable.”

Pepper Schwartz, UW professor and prominent sex researcher with the UW Department of Sociology, echoed this sentiment.

“I think there is a lack of consensus about why teenage pregnancy has gone up,” Schwartz said. “Previous reports had been showing that teen pregnancy was going down — the Right claimed responsibility for it because they said abstinence works — the Left took credit saying that condom use had risen, or that technological modes of contraception had made mistakes less common.”

She said that while there are not yet any good studies to explain this phenomenon, she thought that the increase could be attributed to the recent downturn in the economy, meaning that teens might be more likely to risk immediate plans because they don’t have a strong sense of hope for the future. She reiterated that this was merely a guess.

Bill Albert, deputy director of the nonprofit National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, participated in an online chat hosted by The Washington Post a few weeks after the CDC’s announcement. Albert noted that along with the increase in teen births, the birth rate for women between the ages of 20 and 40 also increased in 2006 and the fertility rate in the United States is at a 35-year high. While he recognized a clear lack of data on this recent upswing, he suggested a need for better sex education.

“We suspect that complacency may have become the enemy of progress,” Albert said. “Consecutive years of declines in the teen birth rate may have led decision-makers to divert important attention, resources and funding to other pressing issues.”

Several individuals, including a teacher and a doctor, expressed concern with the misinformation about sex among teens during the online chat. Some pointed to their local abstinence-only programs, saying that teens under these programs that chose to be sexually active were left with very little information about contraception.

Albert said that at present, there is no evidence to suggest that abstinence-only interventions are effective, but that programs that encourage both abstinence and contraception have been shown to be effective.

“We have a growing amount of evidence suggesting that sex education that discusses both abstinence and contraception are effective at delaying sex and improving contraceptive use among sexually active teens,” Albert said. “The teen pregnancy rate in the U.S. has declined an extraordinary 36 percent since 1990 due to less sex and more contraception. We need more of both.”