The number of 15- to 19-year-olds who delivered babies in Montana rose by 13 percent between 2005 and 2006, according to an analysis released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Only Alaska saw a greater increase, at 19 percent, the CDC reported. Mississippi tied Montana at 13 percent.
“It’s not good news,” said Colleen Lindsay, supervisor of the Women’s and Men’s Health Section of the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services. “It can kind of be a call to action for communities and parents.”
Overall, the teen birth rate rose in 26 states, declined in three and held steady in the remaining 21, including in Wyoming where it was 47.3 births per 1,000 teens, according to CDC statistics.
New Hampshire had the lowest rate in 2006 with 18.7 births per 1,000 teens. In Montana, the rate was 39.6 births per 1,000 teens, up from 35.2 in 2005, CDC reported.
Alaska reported 44.3 births per 1,000 teens, up from 37.3 in 2005, and Mississippi’s rate, the highest in the nation, rose from 60.5 to 68.4 per 1,000.
Despite the recent increase, Montana’s teen birth rate has dropped 25 percent since 1991. The national rate dropped 34 percent in that time.
“We don’t know if it’s just a blip,” Lindsay said of the 2006 numbers. “When we get another year or two of data, it’ll be easier to tie things to it.”
Teens with accurate information about sexuality and pregnancy are less likely to become parents than those who are left in the dark, said Jill Baker, education director for Planned Parenthood of Montana.
Standardized sexual education in schools is common in many European countries and Canada, where the level of sexual activity among teens is the same but teen birth rates are consistently lower than in the United States, Baker said.
“There’s controversy in the United States about sexuality in general,” she said. “Our history in America is very puritan. We’re just seeing that play out.”
American teens are exposed to conflicting messages about sex and pregnancy, Baker said.
Teen pregnancy is glamorized in media coverage of Nickelodeon star Jamie Lynn Spears, who became pregnant at 16 and is raising her child, and by blockbuster movies such as Juno, which chronicles a pregnant high school student’s decision to place her baby for adoption.
Those and other media messages tend not to show the negative consequences of sexual activity and pregnancy, Baker said.
Meanwhile, teens are told by their parents or other trusted adults to be sexually abstinent and often are not given any other information, including information about contraception.
“There’s a disconnect,” Baker said. “There are all these hyper-sexualized images, but they’re not balanced out with medically accurate information.”
Lindsay, who oversees the state’s federally funded family planning clinics, said if children don’t get accurate information from their parents, they are likely to get inaccurate information elsewhere.
“You need to tell them everything, not just what you want them to hear,” she said.
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hsr0601 wrote on Jan 8, 2009 4:16 AM:
In a follow-up study, Moreno emailed the surveyed MySpace users to caution them about their posts on sex and substance abuse. Forty-two percent of them changed their profile within a month. Researchers hope parents take note."As a stranger, we had some impact, but think about the huge impact someone that that teen knows and cares about and looks up to, imagine the impact that could have," Moreno said. THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION ! "