Bad news that this trend should occur as we move into a time of economic problems, but I doubt there's anyone on this board is surprised by the outcome. 8 years (well, 5 given when the statistic is from 2006) of exposure to abstinence only education and we have teens and young adults who don't know what in the hell they're doing and get in trouble.Teen pregnancy rate up after 10-year decline
By JoAnne Allen Joanne Allen Tue Jan 26, 9:05 am ET
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.
The United States has higher rates of teen pregnancy, birth and abortion than in other Western industrialized countries.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
New Mexico led the states with the highest teenage pregnancy rate with nine percent, followed by Nevada, Arizona, Texas and Mississippi.
New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Minnesota and North Dakota had the lowest rates of teen pregnancies.
What concerns me is how long it's going to take to reverse the trend, presuming that it has continued in the mean time. Ideally, it'd kick in as soon as proper sex-ed was implemented, but of course life doesn't work that way. There's likely going to be a time lag as children who have already been indoctrinated to AO work their way out of the system, so to speak and children who have known only proper sex ed reverse the trend. Then there's the resistance from parents and social groups, churches for instance.
