Reality Check: Shaming Isn’t What Reduced Teen Pregnancy Rates
While our two major political parties remain divided on nearly every political issue, there is no partisan divide on teen pregnancy. Democrats and Republicans aren’t sparring over whether teen pregnancy is bad, nor are they locking horns about the need to prevent it. In fact, it was Democratic President Bill Clinton who called teen childbearing “our most serious social problem” in his 1995 State of the Union address. But this framework of social hysteria, that teen pregnancy is an out-of-control crisis, simply isn’t true. Not by a long shot.
According to a recent study by the Guttmacher Institute, U.S. teen pregnancy has reached “historic lows.” The study shows that teen pregnancy rates have been steadily declining since their peak in 1990 and are now at lower levels than they were before the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide. The study also notes that teen pregnancy rates have declined in all 50 states and in every single racial and ethnic group in the U.S.
“Teens, for the first time in history, are getting the resources and support and access to the tools they actually need to prevent pregnancy if that’s what they want to do,” said Natasha Vianna, an advocate for young families and one of the founders of the #NoTeenShame campaign.
As this study demonstrates, we have long since turned a corner on the issue of teen pregnancy, and any claim that there is an teen pregnancy epidemic is simply not corroborated by the evidence. It forces the question: If teen pregnancy is not an epidemic social crisis in the U.S., why are we still talking about it like it is?
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