Bush Policies Likely to Blame for More Teen Births
By Cynthia Tucker
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Wednesday 12 December 2007

First, violent crime. Now, teen birth rates.

After declining for more than a decade, births to unmarried teenagers suddenly increased 3 percent among 15- to 19-year-old girls between 2005 and 2006, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Like the uptick in violent crime, this could signal a worrisome trend - another sign that undesirable social phenomena the nation struggled to curb in the 1990s have begun to ooze back up through the sewer grate. The one-year increase in births to teen moms could be an anomaly. Maybe the numbers for 2007 will show another decline, as adolescent girls stick to their abstinence pledges or remember to use contraceptives. Maybe the 3 percent increase is just a slight bump in the long road toward ending adolescent motherhood.

But the figures are troubling because they come after years of national folly, including a White House strategy of endorsing and funding abstinence-only education. President Bush and other social conservatives have long rejected giving adolescents information about contraception while also encouraging abstinence. They insist that teaching kids to rely on chastity will prevent sexual experimentation.

That never made much sense, given a culture that uses sex to sell everything from toothpaste to T-shirts. Adolescents are hardly immune to those continuous cultural signals, pumped through music, videos and youth-oriented TV shows such as Fox's long-running drama, "The O.C." Over the last couple of years, a raft of studies has given scientific weight to the nagging suspicion that "abstinence only" education is a dud.

In 2005 and 2006, researchers surveyed 2,000 teenagers in two rural and two urban communities. They found that students who had had abstinence-only education were just as likely to have sex as a control group of teens who did not receive the instruction. Among sexually active teens in both groups, the average age of the start of sexual activity was just shy of 15. A majority of those had two or more partners, they said. Just 23 percent reported always using condoms.

The recent rise in teen births stands in stark contrast to more than a decade of decline. Between 1991 and 2005, the rate of births to females aged 15-19 plummeted by 34 percent, from a high of 61.8 births per 1,000 in 1991 to 40.5 live births per 1,000 females in that age bracket in 2005.

And that stunning drop was by no means mere coincidence. Activists and community volunteers who genuinely wanted to curb adolescent pregnancy - as opposed to those who just wanted to rail against abortion and inflict their rigid moral codes on others - worked hard to find programs that actually worked. They formed clubs for teen girls. They wrote scripts for role-playing, teaching teenagers how to say "no" to sex. (Those activists, too, believe in abstinence, but they're not naive about its utility.)

High school teachers assigned homework in which students spent a week caring for crying, fidgeting, diaper-wetting baby dolls, so adolescents would learn how difficult and demanding infants can be. They handed out contraceptives, including Depo-Provera, an injection that proved effective with teenaged girls who were unlikely to remember daily pills.

Through the 1990s, that overlapping network of programs was supported and partially funded by the Clinton White House, which believed in a pragmatic response to social problems. While President Clinton supported a woman's right to choose, he also said abortions should be "safe, legal and rare." The same pragmatism brought federal support for crime prevention efforts, including federal funds for hiring police officers.

By contrast, the Bush White House has turned back to a conservative ideology that mocks government as the source of problems - unless taxpayer funds can be used to further far-right objectives. So Depo-Provera is out, but abstinence pledges are in.

Maybe it's just coincidence that more adolescent girls are having babies. More likely, it's the inevitable result of a raft of foolish policies.

Thats right, blame everything you can on Bush

Total bull****

Stupidist thing I have heard so far

people in this country need to take responsibility for thier actions and stop blaming the goverment good lord america wake up

More BS Propaganda! it's all fabricated lies! LIES,LIES,LIES,LIES,LIES! don't believe it.

now wait a freakin minute here

we all know

it is not bush creating all those teen pregnancies


it is bill

and you know it

after all none of the teens will have sex with gw

but bill that is a hole of a different color

absolutely

it is always someone else's fault

oh I'm sorry when I read Bush policies I thought that somehow they attributed a brazilian to be causing teen pregnancy...

i will admit i do strongly disagree with the abstinence-only b.s. I think that kind of education is wrong. I wonder if it has anything to do with this supposed "war on the middle class"? (food for thought) I know it's a stretch but it's kinda interesting to think about sometimes.

(i guess im alright as long as i wear a helmet... )

I would laugh, but you are probably right.

Bush to blame for teen births?

and people gave Clinton a bad name for a BJ!

Okay,Okay,... all jokes aside...a growth in teen births are due too many variables. However, working in the school system myself, I would like to think we are the "main" influence in students lives....but we are not. The first influence should be parents! But they too are not the only influence that moderates a childs behavior. Many other factors come into play.

You all know how much I hate Bush....but I just thought this was funny.


***If you want to observe "boob-head" mistakes by presidents with regards to public schooling...look at Reagan! He started it! He made ketchup a food group, ketchup labled as a vegetable meant less money going to school budgets!

I'll have to research the ketchup thing. interesting little tid bit. but less money going to schools is not to blame for teen pregnacy. and if you give more money than the year before but it is not as much as they wanted is it giving less? is that the new math i heard about?

What? You mean Bush is the one who's been going around poking holes in all the condoms again?

How about being a good parent to your child and teaching them morals and responsibilities? I know thats a curse word for you liberals. Blame everything on Bush. So typical to always blame someone else for your behavior.

I have two points to make:

1. Why is it always necessary to slam people that are liberals? Because a few speak up with their view points does not mean that all think the same way(no I am not an out and out liberal - I am middle of the road). I get tired of people not discussing the issues and just promptly turning it in to and us vs. them. The issue plan and simple - are policies affecting teen pregnancy?

. 2. I have been teaching high school now for 15 years - through the Clinton and the Bush presidencies - and as a matter of fact presidential policies do affect what happens in schools(lets not forget NCLB and its wonderful affects/effects on schools) and in homes. Someone already mentioned something about what was being taught in the schools and it went from examining all aspects of birth control to abstinence. Does it work? No preaching abstinence does not work for all and never really has - lots of babies born out of wedlock or before a couple had been married 9 months (historically speaking).
The issue of parents teaching morals - I don't think that morals overrides horomones for all teens. Some counties in the Bible Belt states have reported in with a 40 out of a 1000 birth rate among teens while the national average was 22 out of a 1000(I believe these statistics were from 2003 or 2004, which is the most current I have). How about responsibility? Most teens have that part down - after they get pregnant they have the child and drop out to be responsible.
Blaming a specific person makes no sense - blame the policies the man endorses and those that can't see the whole picture as well. All my years teaching have been spent in impoverished areas - reservation to inner city students, and I have seen the change in the birth rate go up among teens drastically in the last 7 years. With a lot of teens they don’t see education as a means to get out of the poverty cycle, they don’t think they can achieve anything more than a minimum wage job, so why bother – start the family early, quit school and move on with life. The cycle perpetuates itself.
What needs to be truly discussed is not that Bush made this happen, but rather how if this trend continues it will affect you, because it does. These kids get pregnant, drop out and become welfare moms….which comes out of your pocket, whether you are a conservative or a liberal.

Why on earth would someone being a Democrat mean that they are not teaching their children morals and responsiblities?

There is no reason to put people down for what political party they belong to - liberal or conservative. I thought that we were all adults here.

I am a Democrat. My child is taught morals and responsibilities. My child even attends a Christian school. My child will be encouraged abstinence but not taught abstinence only. Why? That would not be very responsible of me. We also perform volunteer work for the less fortunate. Now tell me again how being a liberal means not being a good parent and not teaching morals and responsibilities?

To Armydoc:

The more money put into education means more hope for the future of the children. The children will feel that. Money needs to be put back into schools for sports and the arts. Hmmm...wasn't that money taken out of the schools after Clinton? After school activities help keep kids busy and off the streets and less time to spend on "other" things.

Damn presidents impregnating our daughters.