Teen Pregnancy

Throughout the developed world, teen pregnancy rates have dropped over the last 25 years. Teen pregnancy and birth rates in the United States stand at record lows and the numbers continue to decline. The reasons for the decline in the United States are many and include:

• More adolescents are abstaining from sexual intercourse;
• There's a higher desire and motivation of adolescents to achiever higher levels of education, employment training, and future goals beyond parenthood;
• More children receive comprehensive sexuality education, leading to adolescents' greater knowledge about contraception, more effective contraceptive use, and improved ability to effectively use contraception; Greater social support for services related to both pregnancy and disease prevention among teens;
• Easy access to contraceptives and other reproductive health services contributes to better contraceptive use and, in turn, lower teen pregnancy rates.

Facts about teen sexuality in the United States

• In the United States, four in 10 girls become pregnant at least once before age 20-over 900,000 teen pregnancies annually.
• Each hour nearly 100 teen girls get pregnant in the U.S.
• About 40 percent of pregnant teens in the U.S. are 17 or younger.
• In most of the developed world, the majority of young women become sexually active during their teen years, the proportion who have had intercourse reaches at least three-quarters by age 20.
• Teenagers in the United States are more likely to have sexual intercourse before age 15 and have shorter and more sporadic sexual relationships than teenagers in Canada, France, Great Britain, and Sweden. As a result, U.S. teens are more likely to have more than one partner in a given year.
• U.S. teens are having oral and anal sex at earlier ages, each of which have their own risks.
• U.S. teenagers have higher STD rates than adolescents in other developed countries such as England, Canada, France, and Sweden because they have more sexual partners and probably lower levels of condom use.
• The most recent state figures on teen pregnancy ranked Iowa 16th and Illinois 46th for number of teen births. In 1996, 6,220 teen mothers gave birth in Iowa vs. 42,510 in Illinois during the same year.
• Many of the fathers of children born to teen mothers are older, almost half of young men who impregnate a minor teen (under 18) are three or more years older.

When an adolescent female becomes pregnant, she instantly faces an overwhelming number of problems. From health and education, to parenting and employment, teen mothers clearly of a much more difficult time adapting to motherhood vs. women who postponed parenting until their 20s.

Teen mothers are less likely to complete school and more likely to be single parents. Also, it's very difficult for a teen to learn work skills and be a dependable employee while caring for children. It's believed that a teen parent's potential lifetime income, the total amount of money they could earn over the course of their life, is slashed in half once they become a parent.

Teen pregnancy, however, goes deeper than education and potential income. Sexual activity and pregnancy negatively impacts the health of adolescent girls and poses serious risks to their health:

• Young adolescents, especially those under 15 years, experience a death rate 2.5 times greater than that of mothers aged 20-24.
• Common medical problems among adolescent mothers include poor pregnancy weight gain, pregnancy-induced hypertension, anemia, sexually transmitted diseases (STD), and cephalopelvic disproportion.
• Later in life, adolescent mothers tend to be at greater risk for obesity and hypertension than women who were not teenagers when they had their first child.

Children born to teen mothers suffer higher rates of low birth weight and related health problems. Babies born to teen mothers are 21 percent more likely to have low birth weight than babies born to women age 20-24. Low birth weight raises the chances of infant death, blindness, deafness, chronic respiratory problems, mental retardation, mental illness, and cerebral palsy. Low birth weight also doubles the chances that a child will later be diagnosed as having dyslexia (a reading disability), hyperactivity, or other disabilities. Despite having more health problems than the children of older mothers, the children of teen mothers receive less medical care and treatment.

Children born to teen mothers are at a higher risk of poor parenting because their mothers, and often their fathers as well, are typically too young to master the demanding job of being a parent. Still growing and developing themselves, teen mothers are often unable to provide the kind of environment that infants and very young children require for optimal development.

Forty-five percent of first births in the United States are to women who are either unmarried, teenagers, or lacking a high school degree. This means too many children are born into families that are not prepared to help them succeed and the fate of the teen parent is passed to the child.

The consequences of teen pregnancy have startling effects not only one the mother and child, but American society. There are nearly half a million children born to teen mothers each year. Most of these mothers are unmarried and many will end up poor and on welfare.

Teen childbearing costs taxpayers $7 billion each year in direct costs associated with health care, foster care, criminal justice, and public assistance, as well as lost tax revenues.

• Each year the federal government alone spends about $40 billion to help families that started with a teenage birth.
• Over half of foster care placement of children of adolescent parents could be averted by delaying childbearing, saving taxpayers nearly $1 billion annually in foster care costs.
• The growth in single-parent families remains the single most important reason for increased poverty among children over the last 20 years. By reducing teen pregnancy, we can obviously reduce poverty in future generations.
• As teen parents face financial difficulties, the same fate is passed to their children. Children of teens often suffer from poor school performance with 50 percent more likely to repeat a grade. As these children fail to perform well on standardized tests, they are ultimately less likely to complete high school than if their mothers had delayed childbearing.
• One study estimating cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit of teen pregnancy prevention programs found that for every dollar invested in such programming, $2.65 in total medical and social costs were saved. This savings was the result of preventing not only pregnancy, but STD.

Information for this page was taken from The Alan Guttmacher Institute and Teen Pregnancy.Org.

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