Birth rate for teens up after decline

WASHINGTON – After falling steadily for more than a decade, the birth rate for American teenagers jumped last year for the first time since 1991, federal health officials reported Wednesday.

The birth rate rose by 3 percent from 2005 to 2006 among 15- to 19-year-old girls, after plummeting 34 percent between 1991 and 2005, the National Center for Health Statistics reported.

“This is concerning,” said Stephanie Ventura, who heads the center’s reproductive statistics branch. “It represents an interruption of 14 years of steady decline. Now unexpectedly we have an increase of 3 percent, which is a significant increase.”

Ventura said it is too soon to know whether the increase was the beginning of a trend or an aberration. But she said the magnitude of the rise, especially after many years of decline, was worrisome.

While experts said it was unclear what may be causing the reversal, the new data reignited debate about abstinence-only sex education programs, which receive about $176 million a year in federal funding. Congress is currently debating whether to increase that by $28 million.

“The United States is facing a teen pregnancy health care crisis, and the national policy of abstinence-only programs just isn’t working,” said Cecile Richard, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “It is time for everyone who cares about teenagers to start focusing on the common-sense solutions that will help solve this problem.”

But proponents of abstinence education defended the programs, blaming the rise on the ineffectiveness of conventional sexual education programs that focus on condom use and other contraceptives, as well as the pervasive depiction of sexuality in the culture.

“This shows that the contraceptive message that kids are getting is failing,” said Leslee Unruh of the Abstinence Clearinghouse. “The contraceptive-only message is treating the symptom, not the cause. You need to teach about relationships. If you look at what kids have to digest on a daily basis, you have adults teaching kids about the pleasures of sex but not about the responsibilities that go with it.”

Other experts said many factors could be playing a role. It could be, for example, that complacency has set in, or that the increase reflects a broader trend cutting across all ages. Birth rates have also increased for women in their 20s, 30s and early 40s.

The teen birth rate rose sharply between 1986 and 1991, when it hit an all-time high of 61.8 births per 1,000 girls. The increase led to a massive campaign to counter the trend, and the rates of both teenage sexual activity and teen births began falling steadily every year.

This summer, however, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the long decline in teenage sexual activity appeared to have stalled nationally, raising fears that it could presage an increase in teen births.

The most recent data come from birth certificates nationwide. While the birth rate among 10- to 14-year-old girls continued to fall, the rate for those ages 15 to 19 increased from 40.5 per 1,000 girls to 41.9 births per 1,000 in 2006.