Teen Pregnancy — Why sex education is a good thing?
I’d thought about writing something on this topic, but hadn’t really figured out what I wanted to say, when I found this article on Numbers on Teen Pregnancy as a Freakonomics NY Times Opinion piece (here’s the Freakonomincs NY Times blog). I found the statistics on teen pregnancies interesting:
High teen pregnancy rates remain a serious problem in the U.S. Although they have declined since they peaked in 1990, rates are still twice as high as in Canada or England, and eight times as high as in the Netherlands or in Japan.
These international differences are due to low contraceptive use in the U.S.; most of the recent decline in teen pregnancy in the U.S. is due to more consistent use of birth control, although teens are also waiting longer to have sex than in the past. In 1995, almost 20 percent of girls had sex by age 17, compared to 15 percent in 2002.
Notice that the drop in pregnancies among teens has two components — more consistent use of birth control and teen waiting longer to have sex. As to the first, it’s mighty difficult for teens to consistently use birth control when the sex education in our American school systems is mainly about abstinence. We currently have a shinning example of how well that works to lower teen pregnancy with the recent announcement of the pregnancy of the teenage daughter of the Republican Party’s Vice-Presidential nominee. Palin espouses the party line of abstinence-only sex education and pairs it with absolutely no choice even for rape or incest. Obviously, abstinence education didn’t work in this case, as it hasn’t worked for many other teens. For Palin’s daughter, I’d hope that the future will not look as bleak as for most teenage mothers. Again from the article:
…on average, teen pregnancies are more likely to result in premature births and low-birth-weight babies. This is not a good start in life. Babies with a low birth weight are more likely to have A.D.H.D. and are less likely to graduate from high school.
Teen moms are less likely than other women to attend or complete college, and their marriages are more likely to end in divorce; about 50 percent of women who married younger than age 18 are divorced after 10 years, compared to 20 percent of women who married at age 25 or older. In turn, single mothers have the highest poverty rates of any demographic group, and 60 percent of the U.S.-born children in mother-only families are poor.
Being a teenage mother, whether married to the father of the child or not, is a bad spot to be in. It’s not all roses and happy times. It’s mainly lots of work: studying for school, working to pay childcare, rent, food, and all the other assorted expenses of being on your own, and find the time and energy to actually spend time with the child, do the laundry, cook meals, study, and, oh yes, sleep.
How do I know? Been there. Done that. Came out okay with a child that I’m very proud of, a college degree, and I’m sure lots of bad decisions and good ones — but all ones I thought I had to make at the time. How did I end up pregnant? Well, I know it seems strange, but my total sex education was a small six page booklet on menstruation along with the wisdom that only married women get pregnant. Of course, this was in the dark ages — forty years ago now. So this has been a perennial problem and it has never worked to stop teens from having sex by telling them to abstain or leaving them ignorant of what sex is and how one actually gets pregnant — (hint, a marriage license has absolutely no effect on the sperm and the egg getting together).
What does work in helping to reduce teen pregnancy? Truth. Unvarnished truth about how one gets pregnant, what those teenage hormones feel like, that love and hormones are indeed hard to tell apart but mostly it’s hormones at that age, and that if you are going to have sex, protect yourself and good solid information on how to do that. Anything else is just leaving young people vulnerable to their hormones and if you don’t remember what that was like when you were a teen, you shouldn’t have any say over what to tell teens about sex. Abstinence may work, but only if the teens have all the information about what is happening in their body and can make informed decisions. Since many teens are not going to abstain, there must also be information and access to birth control.
If the Republicans want to stick their heads in the sand about these problems, then the least they can do is also set aside money for free child care, free health care, education assistance, and financial assistant to unwed teenage (and older) single parents. But, wait…this is the party that is also cutting back on all these programs. It seems the family values party doesn’t have any concern for families unless they meet strict definitions of what they consider a family and those families are all rich and don’t need any help. And the Pro-Life policy would be better labeled Pro-Birth, because once the child is born, they no longer care about it until its old enough to vote.
Teenage pregnancy is a real problem for the people involved and for the country as a whole and ignoring it and placing the blame on the teens does nothing to rectify the problem or help to solve it. I wish Ms. Palin good luck with the child she’s about to have and the marriage she’s about to undertake. She has a better chance at success than many girls who find themselves in her position, but then she’s not typical. Hopefully, her being in the limelight; after all it’s her mother who is the candidate, will not cause other teens to follow in her footsteps because she’s an outlier on the curve, not the norm (but I forgot Republicans don’t care that much for science either).
Note: On Where Did I Come From? I found this book to be a great beginning in opening up discussion with children about sex and where babies come from. It’s informative, funny, and straightforward. If you’re looking for a way to broach the subject to young children who are asking — give this book a try.