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US Teen Birth Rates Highest In Abstinence-Only States

10/22/10-by Bridgette P. LaVictoire
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released rates regarding teen-pregnancy, and the numbers are sort of good in that they show an overall decline in the numbers of teen pregnancies throughout the nation, but that news is not all good. There are massive regional disparities. For instance, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire all have rates below 25 per 1000 for the year 2008 while Arkansas, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas all had over 60 per 1000.

Mississippi had the highest in the country with 65.7 per 1000 while New Hampshire had the lowest at 19.8 per 1000. Vermont’s declined from 33 per 1000 in 2006 to just over 20 per 1000 in 2008. Vermont will be getting some $850,000 to help drop that number lower.

Leslie Kantor, the national education director of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, has stated that the report “makes it crystal clear that the teen birthrate is lower in states that provide students with comprehensive, evidence-based sex education. The report demonstrates that the surest way to reduce teenage pregnancy is to provide young people with comprehensive, medically accurate sex education, and doing so is especially urgent for African-Americans and Latino teens, who are getting pregnant more frequently than other young people.”

Only one of the five states with the highest teen birth rates mandates sex education as part of the students’ curriculum. That state is New Mexico. The other four stress abstinence-only education. The four states with the lowest teen birth rates, according to the Guttmacher Institute, do not require or stress abstinence. The CDC has stated that this is an issue of public health since children born to teenagers under the age of nineteen are at greater risk of being born prematurely, having low birth weight and dying during infancy.

The Obama Administration has announced some $155 million in grants for non-profits, local school districts, and other groups sponsoring sex-ed programs that have been shown to be effective in lowering the teen birth rate. According to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius “Teen pregnancy is a serious national problem, and we need to use the best science of what works to address it.”

Various Congressmen have called for an end to abstinence-only funding and a desire to have that funding diverted to what works.

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