Increase in Teen Pregnancy Since 2006

A sixteen year old girl walks the mall on an early Saturday morning right before the stores open. She has in tow with her a one year old in her left arm, and a two month old baby in a stroller. The girl's long auburn hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and she has a fatigued look on her face that speaks of a certain loneliness and emptiness in her life. The baby cries for its bottle, while the one year old is gurgling quietly. This scene might appear in any city across the United States, but there is one telling feature about this girl: her left hand is bare of any wedding ring, and there is no father of her babies in sight.

Pre-marital teen pregnancies have risen 3 percent since 2006, an unexpected change from 2001 when such pregnancies started to drop among teens. Nowadays it is no longer unusual to see a teen girl in public who is pregnant, maybe by herself or with a female friend, but never a male. Times have not changed since males have had sex with girls, then upon discovering the girls became pregnant, made themselves scarce. The teen girl is then faced with the burden of having a child by herself, even though it is difficult to conceal a pregnancy from parents who are bound to find out their daughter is pregnant. So why have teen pregnancies risen?

The media is usually the first to be blamed for the rise in teen pregnancies. Movies like Juno, released in 2007, glamorizes unwed pregnancy, along with public figures like Bristol Palin, have provided us with negative female role models who think children and sex go together like bread and butter, although the reality is quite different. For every 1,000 girls, 71 of them have become pregnant in 2006 alone. This seems like a small percentage, and it is small compared to the majority of teens who do not have sex. Moreover, evangelical Christians continue to have the highest rate of unwed pregnancies due to the lack of birth control use. Abstinence education has continued to fail despite the $1.3 billion which has been poured into the program by recent conservative politicians. While abstinence in practice works, lip service to the ideal does not help teens. Teen pregnancy no longer knows any racial boundaries, for it is no longer Latinas and African Americans who have the high rates of teen pregnancy. Instead of abstinence education, real academics and extra-curricular activities would be better spent on teens so they do not have their minds constantly focused on sex and the opposite gender.

This would at least allow teens to develop important talents and skills that will help them get future jobs, something that is a greater contribution to society than babies they can neither afford nor take care of at such a young age.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100126/hl_nm/us_pregnancy_teens_usa