Boarding Schools for Girls

After a 14-year decline, the teen birth rate in the United States rose in 2006 and 2007. According to a June 18 post by Washington Post blogger Rob Stein, one expert believes that the rising birth rate doesn't mean more that teens are having sex, but that fewer are using contraception:

In an article being published in the July issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, [John Santelli of the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health] and his colleagues report that the increase does not appear to be the result of a rise in sexual activity.

Although teen sexual activity might have risen slightly between 2001 and 2003, it appears to have remained fairly flat since then, the researchers found.

Instead, the researchers found that there appears to have been a subtle decrease in contraceptive use, including a slight increase in the use of the withdrawal method and the proportion of teens reporting no contraceptive use.

But perhaps most importantly there was a small but significant drop in condom use, which fell from about 57 percent to about 55 percent from 2003 to 2007.

Santelli reached his conclusions after analyzing data on girls in grades nine through 12 -- information that had been collected during the U.S. government's Youth Risk Behavior Survey.

Labels: pregnancy, sex

Posted By: Aspen/CRC