Red, blue states can celebrate path to maturity

You can count on corporate America to mirror our national hysteria about teen sexuality — whether it’s Urban Outfitters’ cleavage-baring tops or Abercrombie & Fitch’s lettered T-shirts. “Join me in the missionary” they say, or “Stroke my ego.”

They’re designed, along with the profit motive, to reliably raise a Baby Boomer parent’s blood pressure. And they’ve got plenty of us concluding this must be the most sexually irresponsible generation yet.

But here’s a piece of news you’ve have probably missed. It surfaced in recent weeks, only to slip beneath the radar into a sea of far sleazier sex tales, most of them of the Baby Boomer mayoral variety.

So now, here it is: Washington state’s teen pregnancy rates have dipped to the lowest point since reporting began in 1980.

That year there were 94.5 pregnancies for every 1,000 teen girls in the state. The rate dropped to 53.2 for 2003, the most recent year statistics were available.

Not only that, but teen abortion rates in 2003 were less than half the rate for 1980.

Amazing. This generation of scantily clad teens is doing something right.

Given the barrage of belly shirts and navel rings that showed up right around 2003, just how can this be?

State researchers point to a variety of reasons.

If you’re looking for confirmation of a red state/blue state political position, prepare to turn purple. It appears it’s not just better access to more effective forms of birth control, but the message of abstinence, too, that helps. And perhaps a lot more.

Lately clinics such as Planned Parenthood in Spokane have been able to offer free contraceptives in forms busy teens and college students use best — not only the pill, but also hormonal patches and vaginal rings that remain in place for days or weeks at a time. Easier to remember, they’re also more effective.

Various surveys also show teens reporting they’re staying abstinent for longer periods of time. Abstinence remains the best and the worst of contraceptive plans — 100 percent effective, Planned Parenthood leaders point out, with the highest failure rate of them all.

But it’s becoming clearer: It’s not just the messages of the right or the left that teens need to hear — it’s both.

And some day, when the prayers and the protests, the marches and the Supreme Court battles have faded away, we may look back and realize we succeeded on this path both because of and in spite of our heightened efforts.

Dr. Laurie Cawthon, a medical epidemiologist for the state of Washington, looks at the statistics with a wry eye.

She sees evidence that teen pregnancy rates began to decline in the early ‘90s, well before new federal Medicaid waivers began to reduce the costs of pills and patches for teens, and abstinence programs rolled into schools.

She also sees signs that the United States, and Washington state in particular, are undergoing a transition to a more mature population base like that of Western European countries.

She explains it this way: In developing countries, such as those in Africa, both infant mortality rates and birth rates remain exceedingly high. Many more babies must be born just to allow the population to grow.

But in Western Europe, it’s become clear: The land can’t support ever-increasing numbers of people. Population levels have begun to stabilize. New births roughly equal the countries’ deaths each year.

In Sweden, in particular — as health care, education levels and the economy have improved – a wide, well-educated middle class dominates. Birth and abortion rates have plummeted. Their teen pregnancy rates remain well below ours.

Cawthon eyes the data hopefully and says, “Give us 30 or 50 years.” Eventually we’ll be Sweden.

There teens absorb the message to wait until they’re in a committed relationship to have sex, and when they’re ready, they turn to their primary care doctors for advice and for low-cost forms of birth control. They’ve also adopted a cultural value to wait until they’ve finished their education and established their careers before marrying and raising children.

You’ve got to admit — it’s saner than the American approach. Scandinavians talk to their children about the importance of delaying sexual activity. But they don’t join Americans who seem to want to assume young people have sex drives either out-of-control or nonexistent.

This week a Bush administration Web site, 4parents.gov, has come under new criticism. It relies on the politics of abstinence rather than clear reasoning of science to guide parents of American teenagers. That’s a step back on the sanity scale.

Want a calmer, quieter vision of the future?

Dr. Cawthon spins a good one. You might want to pull up a chair from IKEA while you listen.