Teen pregnancy rate up after 10-year decline

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100126/hl_nm/us_pregnancy_teens_usa

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. teen pregnancy rate rose in 2006 for the first time in more than a decade, reversing a long slide, a U.S. think tank reported on Tuesday.

The overall teen pregnancy rate was up 3 percent in 2006, with a 4 percent rise in the rate of births and a 1 percent rise in the rate of abortions, according to the report by the Guttmacher Institute.
The United States has higher rates of teen pregnancy, birth and abortion than in other Western industrialized countries. There were 71 pregnancies per 1,000 U.S. girls aged 15-19. In 2006, 7 percent of all teenage girls got pregnant, according to the report.

(snip)

"It's interesting to note that this flattening out of the rate and the increase in the rate is happening at the same time that we've seen substantial increases in funding for abstinence-only programs," Finer said.
"We do know that when we saw the big decline in the '90s, that a lot of that decline was due to improved contraceptive use among teens."

The abstinence-only programs, backed by many social conservatives who oppose the teaching of contraception methods to teenagers in U.S. schools, received about $1.3 billion in federal funds since the late 1990s.

The Obama administration's 2010 budget eliminated spending for abstinence-only, shifting funds to pregnancy prevention education that include abstinence along with "medically accurate and age-appropriate" information.
(a bit more at article)

There ya go....that explains a lot.

or does abstinence-only education actually increase the pregnancy rate? I wouldn't be surprised if it did.

Can we get back to the sane concept of educating our young again?