(Flickr/CrazyFast)

A New Guttmacher study released today shows a 3 percent increase in teen pregnancies -- meaning that teen births increased by 4 percent and teen abortions increased by 1 percent. This is the first time teen pregnancy is on the increase since the 1990s, a decade during which comprehensive sex education and increased contraceptive use led to a sharp decline in teen pregnancy. 

What we're seeing, according to Guttmacher, is the hangover from the push for ineffective abstinence-only education that the Bush administration promoted. Programs that are scientifically proven to be ineffective in decreasing teen pregnancy or delaying the age of first sexual encounter.

The data gathered by Guttmacher show that teen pregnancy rates are the lowest among non-Hispanic Caucasians (44 per 1,000 teens) and also saw the smallest increase this year. Teen pregnancy rates among black and Hispanic teens are nearly triple that of whites (122.7 and 124.9 per 1,000 respectively). States with the highest teen pregnancy rates were New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, and Mississippi, while states with the lowest rates were New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Minnesota, and North Dakota. It's worth noting that Minnesota has been attempting to pass a comprehensive sex ed requirement for its schools in the last few years, but the legislation has been blocked by Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

Although a Planned Parenthood statement called the increase "substantial," Guttmacher noted that it was "too soon to tell" if this is simply a "short term fluctuation" or the beginning of a long-term increase.

Larry Liston, a state representative in Colorado, called pregnant teens “sluts” at a Republican caucus lunch yesterday:

“In my parents’ day and age, [unmarried teen parents] were sent away, they were shunned, they were called what they are,” Republican Rep. Larry Liston said during a GOP legislative caucus meeting in Denver. “There was at least a sense of shame.”

Liston continued: “There's no sense of shame today. Society condones it ... I think it's wrong. They're sluts. And I don't mean just the women. I mean the men, too.”

Classy. He was talking to health professionals from the area, convened to discuss the state’s poor adolescent health care system and teen birth rate. Colorado’s teen birth rate is ranked 36th in the nation, and apparently some of its lawmakers don't know the difference between making babies and protected sex.

Liston later noted that his real point was more about governmental permissiveness than sluttiness—he’s worried that there’s no government disincentive to deter teenagers from having multiple babies. Still, trying to “shame” young men and women into premarital abstinence seems less effective than providing them with quality, comprehensive sex education.

via Feministing. 

A recently completed study by the Guttmacher Institute found that 1.2 million abortions were performed in America in 2005—the lowest annual rate since 1976. Abortion rates in the U.S. have been dropping fairly steadily since the early 1990s.

While the study doesn’t identify specific causes for the drop, its researchers have some ideas:

"It could be more women using contraception and not having as many unintended pregnancies. It could be more restrictions on abortions making it more difficult for women to obtain abortion services. It could be a combination of these and other dynamics," said Rachel K. Jones of the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health research organization, which published the report in the March issue of the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health.

While the report’s findings are promising for anyone interested in making abortion safe and rare, some of its specifics are less encouraging. 87% of counties in the U.S. lack an abortion provider—which means that 24% of women who live in metropolitan counties and 92% of women who live in nonmetropolitan counties face serious barriers to access.

I’m also curious about the age distribution of the study, which isn’t broken down in the copy I read. According to other info from Guttmacher, 33% of abortions are obtained by women aged 20-25, and 17% of abortions are obtained by teenagers. The teen birth rate jumped in 2005 for the first time in over 15 years, likely due in large part to the simultaneous promulgation and ineffectiveness of abstinence-only sex education.

So what do we make of these seemingly conflicted numbers? Fewer women are having abortions, but more young women are getting pregnant. It seems we’ve failed to provide young women with the tools they need to prevent unwanted pregnancy in the first place: sufficient education about and access to birth control. It’s time to give up on what we know doesn’t work—if this isn’t an argument for eschewing abstinence-only in favor of comprehensive sex ed, I don’t know what is.

    In the United States, approximately two-thirds of all high school seniors have engaged in sexual intercourse.1 According to the Department of Health and Human Services, approximately one in four persons will become infected with a sexually transmitted disease (STD) by the age of twenty-one.2 Additionally, the United States has one the highest rate of teenage pregnancy of any industrialized nation with about forty percent of woman becoming pregnant before the age of twenty.3 While there has been no conclusive evidence that abstinence-only based sexuality education programs either prevent the onset of intercourse or reduce the frequency of intercourse, the United States government currently finances three federal abstinence-until-marriage programs.4 By prohibiting State governments from promoting the use of contraceptives in their school sex education programs in order to receive Federal funding, the United States government is endangering the welfare of its citizens.  
    According to a report entitled “School-Based Programs to Reduce Sexual Risk Behaviors” commissioned by the Division of Adolescent and School Health within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Because incidence of pregnancy and STDs among teenagers is so great, these consequences involve not only the individuals involved and their families, but overall welfare dependency, unemployment, and medical costs in the United States.”5 In 2002, there were an estimated 750,000 pregnancies (450,000 live births) among 15-19 year old girls.6 With the proper use of a condom, chance of pregnancy can be reduced by 98%.7 Furthermore, sexually active teenagers have the greatest chance of becoming infected with an STD than any other age group.8 With about 9.1 million persons between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four being infected every year in the U.S., almost half of all new STD cases occur among young people.9 According to the CDC, at the end of 2003 somewhere between 1,039,000 and 1,850,000 people in the United States were living with HIV/AIDS.10 Of the approximately 40,000 new cases each year, about half occur with persons under twenty-five years old (usually infected through intercourse).11 With the use of a condom, the chance of infection from intercourse with a person with HIV-AIDS is reduced by 80 to 87%.12
    In 1981, Congress passed the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA) “to promote chastity and self discipline” among adolescents by funding “family-centered” programs. The Act, sponsored largely by political conservatives, was used to almost exclusively fund religious and right wing groups that often maintain (without any significant scientific proof) that dissemination of safe sex practice information hastens the initiation of sexual activity and the frequency of intercourse among youths. Allegedly, many of these groups, including Sex Respect and Teen-Aid, relied on “scare-tactics” and misinformation about disease and pregnancy prevention in order to promote their abstinence-based initiatives. In 1983, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against the program on the grounds that it violated the seperation of church and state as required by the U.S. Constitution. In 1993, the case between the challengers and the Department of Justice Counsel for the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) reached an agreement in which certain requirements must be met before the granting of funds through the AFLA to any sex education program. These stipulations include having AFLA grantees submit their curricula to the DHHS for  “consideration of whether the curricula teach or promote religion and whether such materials are medically accurate.”13
     A 2004 report from the office of Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) found that two-thirds of government-funded abstinence-only programs contain misleading or inaccurate information pertaining to abortion, contraception, genetics, and sexually transmitted infections. The report prompted the Government Accountability Office to investigate the claims, releasing a report in 2006 supporting Waxman’s findings.14
    In 1996, Congress attached an additional abstinence-only Federal program to a welfare reform law. According to Title V of Section 510 of the Social Security Act, “Neither the State nor any of its sub-awardees may use Federal or matching funds under this award to promote the use of contraception.” All federally funded sex education programs must adhere to this requirement.15 Over $1.5 billion have been allocated to these federal and state programs since 1996. President Bush has requested $242 million for the funding of abstinence-only programs in his FY2008 budget. Since states are required to match federal funds for abstinence-only programs, some states are forced to divert money away from more comprehensive, medically accurate sex education programs. Eleven states have refused to accept such federal programs because of these terms.16
    In 2007, Congress authorized an extensive year-long study by the Mathematica Policy Research, Inc found that students who participated in federal abstinence-only programs were just as likely to engage in pre-marital sex as those students who did not. They were also found to engage in sexual-risk behaviors at the same mean age and have the same approximate number of sex partners as students who did not participate in the federally funded programs. Another study focusing on individuals engaged in virginity pledge programs (promoting chastity until marriage) found that, although many did delay the onset of sexual activity, many of these youths (88%) still engaged in premarital sex but were less likely than non-pledgers to use contraceptives at first intercourse or to get tested for STDs.17
    Relying on evaluations of twenty-three separate national surveys, the “School-Based Programs to Reduce Sexual Risk Behaviors” report by the CDC found that comprehensive school sex education programs covering topics such as abstinence, conception, pregnancy, STD, and HIV-AIDS did not lead to an increase in sexual activity. Programs designed to promote the use of contraceptives, such as condoms, also did not increase the onset or frequency of sexual activity. “Indeed, all of them either delayed the onset of intercourse or had no effect upon the initiation of intercourse. Furthermore, of the four studies that focused on program impact on the frequency of intercourse, none found significant increases in sexual activity, and one found a significant decrease among the relatively small proportion of youths who initiated intercourse after program implementation.”18
    It is estimated that only 10% of school districts in the U.S. have comprehensive sexuality programs that promote not just abstinence but the use of contraceptives and safe sex practices.19 The CDC “School-Based” report stated that two studies it analyzed indicated that some comprehensive programs reduce the onset of sexual activity, limit the number of sexual partners, and increase the use of contraceptives. “Logically they should also reduce pregnancy, births, STD, and HIV rates.”20 It is the responsibility of the American government to ensure the general welfare of its citizens. When the federal government blatantly disregards rigorous scientific data in order to promote ineffective morality-based sexuality programs in state school systems, that government can be held accountable for actually harming the lives of its citizens.

Britney Spears' younger sister Jamie Lynn Spears announced that she’s pregnant. This is a girl who’s 16, rich and famous, and is now being held up as "responsible" for taking ownership and deciding to keep her baby.

Why isn’t anyone talking about why she’s pregnant in the first place? “It was a shock for both of us, so unexpected,” Jamie Lynn told Ok! magazine. “I was in complete and total shock and so was [my boyfriend].” She can’t possibly lack knowledge or access to birth control, so why was her pregnancy a shock? If you have sex without protection, you might get pregnant. NOT SHOCKING, right? Granted, she could have had a condom break or something, but that's why Plan B is available over-the-counter.

My beef isn’t with what she—or other girls in her position—decided to do with her pregnancy. But instead of using her situation (and spotlight) to mention the preventability of teen pregnancy, Jamie Lynn holds up abstinence as a reasonable solution for other girls. “I definitely don’t think it’s [premarital sex] something you should do; it’s better to wait,” she said. “But I can’t be judgmental because it’s a position I put myself in.” Jamie Lynn casts premarital sex as the problem when unprotected sex is clearly the issue at hand—thus passing up a perfect opportunity to slip the solution into the dialogue. 

A girl who’s a role model for millions of other young girls shouldn’t be heralded for failing to use contraception. Period.

And MSNBC definitely shouldn’t be running a poll on whether Jamie Lynn will be a better mother than Britney.

Last year, the teen birth rate rose for the first time since 1991, according to a report released yesterday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Among teenagers 15-19, the birth rate went up 3% from 2005 to 2006.

Unsurprisingly, these findings raise major questions about the effectiveness of the Bush administration’s abstinence-only sex ed programs—looks like we’re not getting much for the $176 million the federal government pours into such programs each year. The CDCP report comes on the heels of a major study of abstinence-only programs that

failed to demonstrate that they have any effect on delaying sexual activity among teenagers, and some studies suggest that they may actually increase pregnancy rates.

Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation senior research fellow, said implicating abstinence-only programs in the rising teen birth rate is “stupid.” Always good to see a right-winger’s perspective on the mess he helped create.