News & Articles
Rising teen birth rate a problem we need to address
January 2, 2008
THERE’S NO WAY to look at a new report showing an increase in births to teen mothers but as bad news.
Babies born to teens are more likely than babies born to grown-ups to be underweight and thus susceptible to all sorts of health problems both as infants and throughout their lives. Their mothers are less likely than their grown-up counterparts to marry their children’s fathers. They are more likely to skip college or even drop out of high school than their peers who don’t have babies, which means they’re less likely to ever get decent jobs. And of course all that means that the children are unlikely to have the stable home lives and the social and educational support they need to succeed in school, and in life, themselves.
Officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say it’s too early to tell whether the 2006 increase is the start of a disturbing new trend or a statistical blip in what had been a 15-year downward trend. But it’s not too early to say that we have a problem in South Carolina, where our teen birth rate has long been in the top 10 nationally. Last year, it climbed to sixth from seventh among the 50 states.
Not coincidentally, the teen birth report came on the heels of another that showed our infant mortality rate continues to climb in South Carolina.
If there’s a glimmer of not-awful news in the latest numbers, it’s that, at least nationally, the uptick in teen births is among the older teens — the 18- and 19-year-olds who at least technically are adults. But while 18-year-old moms were not common through most of human history, and while the health risks to their children isn’t nearly as great as to the children of 13-year-olds, the fact is that having babies at this age is almost certainly going to turn out badly. In an era when a high school diploma is a ticket either to college or to a dead-end job, 18- and 19-year-olds need to be pursuing their educations, not changing diapers.
These numbers should call us to action — if only we knew how to act.
The problem is that we can’t even seem to have rational conversations about how to address the problem, because the “debate” over teen pregnancy is just another front in the culture wars, and it’s controlled by the same ideological extremes that control the abortion debate. This time, the point of contention is sex education and abstinence education and self-respect education; at least both sides say they support that last approach, although they tend to define it very differently.
All the energy these groups waste fighting over the “right” approach might not be so bad if either side had figured out what the “right” approach is. Neither has. Although the research has cast serious doubt on some popular abstinence-only programs, that doesn’t automatically mean the concept is bankrupt — although we need some assurance that specific programs do work before we keep spending tax money on them. And even the best sex-education programs can’t solve this problem alone; birth control is not 100 percent effective, and as long as young girls don’t have the support networks and interests and self-esteem to say no to sex, as long as our culture keeps telling them to do it, we’re going to have teen births.
Both sides have some ideas that make some sense and some that don’t, but neither is particularly interested in admitting when the other side’s ideas make sense or when its own programs just aren’t working. They need to learn how to do that, because if there is a silver bullet, no one has found it yet.