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Teen Pregnancies at Record Low In California
Filed under: In The News, Research Reveals: Teens
Teen pregnancies in California have hit an all-time low, something state officials attribute to girls receiving sex education and having access to family planning programs and reproductive health services.
Officials at the California Department of Public Health released fresh statistics Feb. 22. They report teen pregnancies reached a record low in 2008.
About 35 babies were born that year for every 1,000 female teenagers. That's two fewer babies than the 2007 rates.
Laurie Weaver, the chief of the department's Office of Family Planning, tells the Los Angeles Times that this is a testament to teaching sex education and giving girls as many options as possible."We believe the only 100 percent effective way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease is through abstinence," Weaver tells the newspaper. "But we do believe it is important to teach teens that if they choose to be sexually active, that they should be fully informed of contraceptives and have access to services."
Meanwhile, teen pregnancy rates nationally have been increasing in recent years. Compared with California's 2007 rate of 37.1 percent, the U.S. birth rate for 2007 was 42.5 percent -- up from 40.5 percent in 2005.
Californians can be proud, Norman Constantine, a senior scientist at the Public Health Institute in Oakland and a clinical professor at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, tells the Times.
"This is absolutely phenomenal," Constantine tells the paper. "It's almost unbelievable at a time when the national rate continues to go up."
Weaver is similarly proud.
"This is the lowest teen birth rate for 15- to 19-year-olds as long as we've been tracking it," she tells the Times.
Constantine gives credit to such services as the Family Planning, Access, Care and Treatment Program. Some $45 million of the approximately $450 million program is used to serve teens, he tells the Times.
He also applauds California for not accepting federal dollars tied to abstinence-only funding -- a philosophy Weaver calls "abstinence plus."
Related: Sex in the media influencing teen pregnancies
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ReaderComments (Page 1 of 1)
2-25-2010 @ 11:50AM
Elizabeth said...While it's true that Californians definitely have better access to birth control than most other states, this is only true of our metropolitan areas. Los Angeles, San Fransisco, San Diego--sure, it's easy to access places like free clinics and Planned Parenthood. But it's not necessarily the case in the suburban areas where people tend to be a bit more conservative and right-winged. For example, the closest Planned Parenthood in the town I grew up in is over a hundred miles away, and this is because the conservative town base got rid of the one we had fifteen years ago. I happen to know a lot of teenagers who got pregnant--not that they were fifteen, they were eighteen and nineteen, but that's still too young in my opinion. What people need to realize is that places like Planned Parenthood aren't just the abortion clinics the Pro-Lifers make them out to be. They also provide information that many teens wouldn't otherwise get anywhere else. Having one in your town doesn't mean you've got a bunch of loose teens jumping into bed with each other--if anything it means that teens that choose to have sex will be doing so better informed and safer.
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5-24-2010 @ 8:27PM
Mike said...I don't really understand the statistics as they are presented in this article. Near the top, it claims that 35 babies are born per 1,000 teenage females in 2008, down from 2 the year before. That would imply that in 2007 there were 37 babies born per 1,000 females, or 3.7%. However, later in the article you say that California has a 37.1% rate.
Another issue here is that you seem to use pregnancy rate and birth rate interchangeably. I guess we can let this pass if the percentage of pregnancies that come to term are high, but then what could explain the discrepancy I mentioned above?
I don't doubt that California's policy of teaching safe sex isn't helping them, but this article's sloppiness is making it difficult for me to understand what's going on.
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5-24-2010 @ 11:04PM
Leandro said...Mike, the writer has "percent" and "per thousand" confused. Probably just a mistake because "percent" is such a common word. He meant 37.1‰.