Teen Pregnancy: How Parents Can Make a Difference Podcast

Fifteen-year-old Zina, five months pregnant with twins after incorrectly following the instructions on her birth-control pills, states, “I am meant to have these babies, and I don’t want to change it in any way. If it wasn’t meant to be, then I wouldn’t be pregnant.”

Sounds almost like a movie, doesn’t it? We’ve seen versions of it in “Juno,” the story of a pregnant teen searching for quality adoptive parents, and on the CW’s Gossip Girl, where a leading female character had a pregnancy scare. In real life, Jamie-Lynn Spears, 16-year-old sister of Britney and star of Nickelodeon’s Zoey 101, announced that she was pregnant in December 2007. Needless to say, teen pregnancy is on our minds.

And it should be. The United States has the highest rates of teen pregnancies and births of all developed countries. Though these numbers had been on the decline over the last 15 years, for the first time since 1991, teen births in the United States are on the rise again. The National Center for Health Statistics released birth data for 2006, which found a 3% increase in teen births (from 40.5 births/1000 females in 2005 to 41.9 births per 1000 females in 2006). Teen mothers are less likely to finish school, more likely to be single parents, and fall into poverty. In addition, babies born to teen mothers are more likely to have low birth weight and other health-related complications, and babies born to teen parents are more likely to be teen parents themselves. Teen pregnancies cost taxpayers—take a big breath—$9.1 billion each year.

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Issue: April 2008