For decades, campaigners against teen sex claimed annual reductions in pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases as proof that the message was getting out.
But today that message doesn?t appear to be getting out.
For the first time in 14 years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this month that teen pregnancies are on the rise. A separate CDC report found similar increases in most tracked STDs in the 15- to 24-year-old range.
“It?s depressing in that for the first time … it?s started to rise again,” said Hal Donofrio, president and CEO of the Campaign for Our Children, a Baltimore-based advocacy organization working on this issue for 20 years. “Over that time, teen pregnancy has gone down about 20 to 25 percent, and we think we had a lot to do with that. In Maryland it?s gone down 30 percent.”
The problem, Donofrio said, is complacency. “We have a problem in a country like ours. That is once we attack a problem, give it a good shot and start the numbers going down, people begin to give up on it, stop funding the programs.”
Between 2005 and 2006, the birth rate for teenagers ages 15-19 rose 3 percent in 2006, according to statistics released by CDC?s National Center for Health Statistics on Wednesday. This follows a 14-year downward trend in which the teen birth rate fell by 34 percent from its all-time peak of 61.8 live births per 1,000 girls in 1991.
