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Teen Sex and Pregnancy
Revised 9/1999
SEXUAL ACTIVITY
• Most very young teens have not had intercourse: 8 in 10 girls and 7 in 10 boys are sexually inexperienced at age 15. ... 3
• While 93% of teenage women report that their first intercourse was voluntary, one-quarter of these young women report that it was unwanted. ... 7
Sex is rare among very young teenagers, but common in the later teenage years. ... 8
• Teenage womens contraceptive use at first intercourse rose from 48% to 65% during the 1980s, almost entirely because of a doubling in condom use. ... 10
• About 1 in 6 teenage women practicing contraception combine two methods, primarily the condom and another method.11
• The method teenage women most frequently use is the pill (44%), followed by the condom (38%). ... 14
• In a single act of unprotected sex with an infected partner, a teenage woman has a 1% risk of acquiring HIV, a 30% risk of getting genital herpes and a 50% chance of contracting gonorrhea.15
• Chlamydia is more common among teens than among older men and women; in some settings, 10-29% of sexually active teenage women and 10% of teenage men tested for STDs have been found to have chlamydia. ... 17
• In some studies, up to 15% of sexually active teenage women have been found to be infected with the human papillomavirus, many with a strain of the virus linked to cervical cancer.18
• Teenage women have a higher hospitalization rate than older women for acute pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), which is most often caused by untreated gonorrhea or chlamydia. PID can lead to infertility and ectopic pregnancy.19
TEEN PREGNANCY
• Each year, almost 1 million teenage women--10% of all women aged 15-19 and 19% of those who have had sexual intercourse--become pregnant. ... teenage pregnancy rate declined 17% between 1990 and 1996, from 117 pregnancies per 1,000 women aged 15-19 to 97 per 1,000. ... 22
Teen Pregnancy Outcomes41
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More than half (56%) of the 905,000 teenage pregnancies in 1996 ended in births (2/3 of which were unplanned). ... 23
• Teen pregnancy rates are much higher in the United States than in many other developed countries--twice as high as in England and Wales or Canada, and nine times as high as in the Netherlands or Japan.24
• Steep decreases in the pregnancy rate among sexually experienced teenagers accounted for most of the drop in the overall teenage pregnancy rate in the early-to-mid 1990s. ... 26
• The fathers of babies born to teenage mothers are likely to be older than the women: About 1 in 5 infants born to unmarried minors are fathered by men 5 or more years older than the mother. ... 29
• 1/4 of teenage mothers have a second child within 2 years of their first. ...
The headline Britain is worst in Europe for teenage pregnancy rates, in the July edition news section, gave mecause for concern, but perhaps for another reason than intended. I feel that initiatives to reduce teenage pregnancy rates can cause more harm than good especially when they do not differentiate between wanted and unwanted pregnancies.
Approximate Word count = 2610
Approximate Pages = 10.4
(250 words per page double spaced)
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