The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported today that Mississippi has displaced Texas as the State with the highest rate of teen pregnancy at 68 births per 1,000 women in their teens. But Texas remains a not too distant 3rd with 63 births per 1,000 teens. The national average is 42 births per 1,000 teen women.
More alarming is the fact that the rate in Texas is increasing after significantly decreasing from 1991 - 2005 -- from 78.4 per 1,000 in 1991 to 61.6 per 1,000 in 2005. 2006 saw that number increase to 63.1 per 1,000.
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Mississippi has highest teen birth rate, CDC says
By MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical Writer Mike Stobbe, Ap Medical Writer
Wed Jan 7, 5:08 pm ET
ATLANTA – Mississippi now has the nation's highest teen birth rate, displacing Texas and New Mexico
for that lamentable title, a new federal report says. Mississippi's
rate was more than 60 percent higher than the national average in 2006,
according to new state statistics released Wednesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The teen birth rate for that year in Texas and New Mexico was more than 50 percent higher.
The
three states have large proportions of black and Hispanic teenagers —
groups that traditionally have higher birth rates, experts noted.
The lowest teen birth rates continue to be in New England, where three states have rates at roughly half the national average, which is 42 births per 1,000 teen women.
It's
not clear why Mississippi, with 68 births per 1,000, surged into first
place. The state's one-year increase of nearly 1,000 teen births could
be a statistical blip, said Ron Cossman, a Mississippi State University researcher who focuses on children's health statistics.
The New Mexico rate was 64 per 1,000; Texas was 63. New Hampshire, with a rate of 19 per 1,000, was the nation's lowest.
More
than a year ago, a preliminary report on the 2006 data revealed that
the U.S. teen birth rate had risen for the first time in about 15
years. But the new numbers provide the first state-by-state breakdown.
The new report is based on a review of all the birth certificates in 2006. Significant increases in teen birth rates were noted in 26 states.
"It's pretty much across the board" nationally, said Brady Hamilton, a CDC statistician who worked on the report.
About
435,000 of the nation's 4.3 million births in 2006 were to mothers ages
15 through 19. That was about 21,000 more teen births than in 2005.
Numerically, the largest increases were in the states with the largest populations. California, Texas and Florida together generated almost 30 percent of the nation's extra teen births in 2006.
Some
experts have blamed the national increase on increased federal funding
for abstinence-only health education that does not teach teens how to
use condoms and other contraception. They said that would explain why
teen birth rate increases have been detected across much of the country
and not just in a few spots.
There is
debate about that, however. Some conservative organizations have argued
that contraceptive-focused sex education is still common, and that the
new teen birth numbers reflect it is failing.
Other
factors include the escalating cost of some types of birth control and
their unavailability in some communities, said Stephanie Birch, who
directs maternal and child health programs for the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services.
Glowing
media portrayals of celebrity pregnancies don't help, either, she said.
"They make it out to be very glamorous," said Birch, who cited a
calculation by Alaska officials that teen births were up 6 percent in
that state in 2006.
A variety of
factors influence teen birth rates, including culture, poverty and
racial demographics. For those and other reasons, kids in mostly white New England likely would delay child birth, said David Landry, a researcher at the Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based organization which supports abortion rights and gathers research on sexual and reproductive health.
"It's
more costly for youth in the Northeast to have a teen birth than for
youth in the South, in terms of opportunities they'll miss," he said.
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On the Net:
CDC report: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr57/nvsr57_07.pdf
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