Girls more cautious about sex as teen birthrate drops

WASHINGTON – U.S. teen pregnancy and birthrates have plummeted to all-time lows as more teenagers delay sex, abstain from it, use contraception and use it more effectively. Abortions also are down.

The decline, to the lowest teen birthrates since national tallies began in 1940, is a remarkable personal health reform, sharper than U.S. declines in smoking or increases in seat-belt use.

Counselors who work with teens cite many factors but give much credit to more cautious and assertive girls.

“A lot more of us are making our own sexual decisions. That way, you don’t get pushed around by your partner who wants you to do more,” said Anna Bialek, 17, of Princeton, N.J. “Of course, that can work both ways.”

Whatever the reasons, teen pregnancies and births are down about a third nationwide from their peaks in 1991, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. If the 1991 rates had persisted, about 1.2 million more children would have been born to teen mothers by 2004, Congress’ Joint Economic Committee estimated last year.

“It’s a big success story,” said Dr. John Santelli, a Columbia University public health professor and the lead author of a recent analysis of the decline. He attributes about half the drop to teens saying no to intercourse. The other half, he said, is due to their using contraceptives more often and more efficiently.

This rosy picture has two blemishes. First, the U.S. teen birthrate remains the highest in the industrialized world – twice Canada’s, for example, and five times France’s. Second, the rates of sexually transmitted diseases in the United States are the highest in the industrialized world.

That said, the decline in pregnancy among American teenagers is impressive: In 1990, 116 teens out of every thousand aged 15 to 19 got pregnant, according to the CDC. By 2000, just 85 did. More recent estimates of teen births suggest that the decline continues.

But counselors who’ve worked with teens, especially those who’ve been in the same settings for years, have some strong hunches about what’s been happening. In many cases, statistics back them up.

Among their theories:

• More assertive girls.

“Condoms used to be a guy thing, a guy’s choice, really,” said Andrea Aumaitre, 38, who graduated from New Jersey’s Camden High School as a teen mother and has been a sex-ed counselor at the inner-city school since 1996. “Now our young ladies say, ‘I want you to use a condom,’ or they carry condoms themselves.”

Aumaitre and other Camden counselors said girls, especially African Americans, were more cautious about sex nowadays because they were more ambitious. “They want to finish school, go to work, go on to college, and they believe pregnancy will get in their way,” Aumaitre said.

Interesting numbers: Nationwide, the proportion of African American girls aged 15 to 17 who said they’d had intercourse fell from three-quarters to just over half from 1991 to 2001.

• Abstinence is up.

“Kids want to do the right thing, and most of them understand deep down that sexual activity is an adult thing,” said Elayne Bennett, who founded the Washington-based national abstinence-only program Best Friends Foundation in 1987. In Bennett’s view, abstinence pledges work because they deliver a clear message. The more tolerant approach, which she characterized as “don’t do it, but here’s how to protect yourself when you do do it,” confuses kids, she said.

Terri Gosser, 47, a school counselor known as “the sex lady” since 1992 to Pinelands junior and senior high students in the mostly white rural area around Tuckerton, N.J., said she was seeing more abstinence-pledgers. Whatever the reason, the latest CDC survey reported that roughly two-thirds of males aged 15 to 17 had never had intercourse. In 1988, half hadn’t.

Interesting numbers: Virginity pledges rarely hold until marriage but typically defer the age of first sex by about 18 months for adolescents 12 to 18, according to a study by Peter Bearman, a Columbia University sociologist, and Hannah Brueckner, a sociologist at Yale.

• Anxieties over AIDS and other STDs are powerful motivators.

Having multiple partners used to be cool among her South Jersey students, Gosser said, “for guys and girls, too.”

That’s changed, she said. “Now kids say the players are dirty. They don’t mean that they’re sluts,” Gosser added. “It’s said with a hygienic implication.”

Interesting numbers: Condom use among teens aged 15 to 17 increased almost 30 percent from 1991 to 2001, according to federal surveys. Withdrawal as a means of contraception dropped 35 percent. The number of teens who used no contraception dropped 23 percent.

• The availability of contraceptives is up.

In her day, the only place where Camden’s teens could get condoms easily was at Planned Parenthood, according to Camden High’s Aumaitre. “And boys didn’t go there; they thought Planned Parenthood was for girls.”

New York teens faced roughly the same problem until the early ‘90s, said Neal Blangiardo, 36, a teen sex counselor at New York’s Children’s Aid Society, where he’s worked for 10 years.

“Now the young men I work with can tell me five or six places they can get free condoms,” he added.

Also newly available are longer-term, more popular and more effective contraceptives, such as Depo-Provera and the contraceptive patch, Aumaitre said.

Interesting numbers: Roughly a third of black female teens who’d had sex used condoms the last time, according to a sex behavior survey that the CDC released Sept. 15. That compares with a quarter of Hispanic teen girls and a fifth of white teen girls.

• More parental involvement.

Lots more parents are talking to the teens about sex, Blangiardo said, “because parents can do what counselors can’t: They can take their family’s values and make them stick with their kids.”

Interesting numbers: When Gosser started teaching sex ed, about a quarter of parents wouldn’t let their kids participate. Last year, just five of 400 junior high parents refused. None of the 900 high school parents did.