Keep your teenager educated
May is National Teen Pregnancy Prevention Month, sponsored by Advocates for Youth, an organization working on behalf of the Office of Adolescent Health coordinating efforts of Health and Human Services to improve health and help prevent disease and unintended pregnancies.
Advocates for Youth cites several peer-reviewed studies, including one sponsored by the U.N. Joint Programme on HIV and AIDS in 1997 which demonstrate that comprehensive sex education has proved effective by helping youth delay sexual activity, reduce the frequency of sexual activity and number of sexual partners and increase contraceptive use.
Also, a 1993 World Health Organization study shows young people who receive comprehensive sex education are not more likely to become sexually active, increase sexual activity or experience negative sexual health outcomes.
Alicia Forrest is the director of sexual health education at the Ark-La-Tex Crisis Pregnancy Center in Shreveport.
Forrest said, “I believe sexual abstinence is the most effective teen pregnancy prevention initiative. The evidence is pretty simple. If you aren’t having sex, you can’t get pregnant. But I will say the days of fear-tactic abstinence education are over.”
While it’s clear that abstinence as a behavior works when always followed, Advocates for Youth points out that a congressionally-mandated study of abstinence-only programs by Mathematica Policy Research in 2007 found that abstinence-only programs were ineffective.
Students participating in these programs were found to be no more likely to abstain from sex than other students. Among youth participating in “virginity pledge” programs, a study published in the American Journal of Sociology in 2001 showed that 88 percent broke the pledge and had sex before marriage.
Additionally, a 2005 study in the Journal of Adolescent Health showed that once pledgers began to have sex, they had more partners in a shorter period of time and were less likely to use contraception than non-pledgers.
Katie Caldwell is the reproductive healthcare advocate for Choice Louisiana in Shreveport.
Caldwell said, “I think that it is naive to believe that all teenagers will abstain from all sexual activity.
“At least some of them will choose to be sexually active and we are doing them an incredible disservice by refusing to expose them to accurate, evidence-based, comprehensive sexual education. It creates this terrible, unrealistic ideal in which participating in sexual activity outside of a very specific context is a shameful, punishable offense. As a result, those that do not remain abstinent are considered “ruined” in some way; this is not the best strategy for promoting high self-esteem and the confidence to establish healthy sexual practices and boundaries. Moreover, if a teenager has been conditioned to believe that sex is wrong, they are very unlikely to open a dialogue with a trusted adult about the subject. There are many situations where this could have devastating consequences.”
Forrest said, “Sexual health education is key when it comes to reducing teen pregnancy. It’s so important but you can’t just focus on the physical aspects of sexual health.
“Our teenagers need help discovering who they are … and they desperately need to be educated on the basics of friendship, love, communication, conflict resolution, problem-solving, peer pressures, cultural influences, relationship development … you have to address the individual as a whole for sex education to be successful at reducing teen pregnancy.”
Caldwell said, “I believe that one of the best ways to prevent unwanted teen pregnancy is to teach children from a young age about their ability to consent. A common example: A parent is tickling their toddler and their child yells ‘stop.’ “The child may be giggling and appear to enjoy the interaction, so the parent ignores the child’s request and continues tickling.
“When their ‘stop’ or ‘no’ is ignored, the implicit message being sent is that they do not have control over someone touching their body. Another common example would be a parent telling their child to ‘come kiss/hug’ a family member or friend. If a child resists their behavior is “rude” and they are often chastised.
Children are being taught that they do not have the ability to say no without being punished.
“These children become teenagers who have been conditioned to be uncomfortable asserting their right to say no. How can we expect them to be able to resist being pressured into physical activity that they are uncomfortable with when we’ve effectively conditioned them to do the opposite?” The good news is that teen pregnancy rates are declining.
According to CDC statistics, pregnancy rate of adolescent females in 2011 (31.3 pregnancies per 1000) was down 73.2 percent from the U.S. high in 1990 (116.9 per 1000).
This downward trend tracks across all racial, ethnic and economic groups.
They have determined that teens seem to be less sexually active and more sexually active youth are using birth control than in previous years.
– Michael Stone
