A think tank with ties to Planned Parenthood found that for the first time in more than a decade, teen pregnancy rates rose in 2005 and 2006. The study conducted by the Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood's de facto research arm, found that the pregnancy rate among girls ages 15 to 19 rose three percent, accompanied by a rise in the abortion rate of one percent over the same time period.

The Guttmacher study found that teen pregnancy rates declined 41 percent between 1990, when there were 116.9 pregnancies per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19, and 2005, when the birth rate was 69.5 per 1,000 teens. The study also found that teen birth and abortion rates likewise declined, with births dropping 35 percent between 1991 and 2005, and abortions among teen girls declining 56 percent between 1988 and 2005.

Those trends changed in 2006, when pregnancies rose to 71.5 per 1,000 women aged 15-19. "Put another way," noted a press release accompanying the Guttmacher report, "about 7% of teen girls became pregnant in 2006."

According to the study, while pregnancy rates for Caucasian teens were still significantly lower than for blacks and Hispanics, the rates for all three groups rose for the period studied.

Data for the study came from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the Guttmacher Institute.

Heather Boonstra, a policy analyst with the Guttmacher Institute, was quick to politicize the findings, calling the upward trend "deeply troubling" and claiming that the results coincided "with an increase in rigid abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, which received major funding boosts under the Bush administration."

Referring to an Obama Administration policy moving federal funding away from abstinence-based sex-ed programs, Boonstra added, "Fortunately, the heyday of this failed experiment has come to an end with the enactment of a new teen pregnancy prevention initiative that ensures that programs will be age-appropriate, medically accurate and, most importantly, based on research demonstrating their effectiveness."

But Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association, warned that while the rise in teen pregnancies is certainly alarming, it would be disingenuous to blame it solely on such factors as abstinence education. "The overly sex-saturated culture certainly plays a part," she said, "with teen sex communicated almost as an expected rite of passage, without consequences, and that's a dangerous message for young people, who tend to be risk-takers anyway."

Richard Ross, founder of a faith-based abstinence program called True Love Waits, noted that given that the study comes from an organization with strong ties to the abortion industry, its findings can hardly be called objective. "Should we expect the Guttmacher Institute, the research arm for Planned Parenthood, to support abstinence messages?" he asked, adding this explanation for the one-sided study, "Abstinent teenagers don't get pregnant and thus they don't contribute millions of dollars to the abortion industry. If you want to understand new directions in Washington related to abstinence, follow the money."

In a blog posting for National Review Online, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation called the rush to blame abstinence education for the rise in teen pregnancies "a bit hypocritical," noting, "In the decade after the federal government began its meager funding of abstinence education, teen pregnancy fell steadily. Safe-sex experts never linked that decline to abstinence education. But when the news went bad, they swiftly identified abstinence programs as the culprit."

Rector also noted the Guttmacher study's free and easy use of the term "teen," pointing out that for most people, "teen pregnancy" implies pregnancy among high-schoolers, girls under age 18. According to Guttmacher's own data, the pregnancy rate for 15- to 17-year-old girls barely changed, and the rate for girls 14 and under (the group most affected by abstinence programs) actually dropped."

By contrast, Rector noted, pregnancy and birth rates for women aged 18 and 19 rose dramatically. "The rise in pregnancies and births in this age range is part of a much larger story: the collapse of marriage and explosive growth of out-of-wedlock births in lower income communities," he concluded.

Huber pointed out that contraceptive-based sex education received four times more funding than did abstinence education during the years of the study, but that Guttmacher focused no attention on possible flaws in that model.

The truth of the matter, said Huber, is that research clearly shows "delaying sexual initiation rates and reducing the total number of lifetime partners is more valuable in protecting the sexual health of young people than simply passing out condoms."

Photo of billboard, "Virgin: Teach your kid it's not a dirty word": AP Images
 

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