From the Rivard Report:
In Texas each year, about 35,000 young women get pregnant before they turn 20. Traditionally, the two variables most commonly associated with high teen birth rates are education and poverty, but a new study, co-authored by Dr. Julie DeCesare, shows that there’s more at play.
“We controlled for poverty as a variable, and we found these 10 centers where their teen birth rates were much higher than would be predicted,” she said.
DeCesare, whose research appears in the June issue of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, said several of those clusters were in Texas. The Dallas and San Antonio areas, for example, had teen pregnancy rates 50% and 40% above the national average.
Research shows teens everywhere are having sex. Gwen Daverth, CEO of the Texas Campaign To Prevent Teen Pregnancy, said the high numbers in Texas reflect policy, not promiscuity.
“What we see is there are not supports in place,” Daverth said. “We’re not connecting high-risk youth with contraception services. And we’re not supporting youth in making decisions to be abstinent. We’re just saying that is an approach we want to take as a state – whereas other states have put in more progressive policies.”
Daverth said California invested in comprehensive sex education and access to contraception. There, the teenage birth rate dropped by 74% from 1991 to 2015. The teen birth rate in Texas also fell, but only by 56%.
In South Carolina, young women on Medicaid who have babies are offered the opportunity to get a long-acting form of birth control right after they give birth. They’re also trying that approach in parts of North Carolina. And Colorado subsidizes the cost of long-acting birth control. There, both abortions and teen birth rates are dropping faster than the national average.
Texas makes it hard for teenagers to get reproductive health care, Daverth says.
In Texas, if a 17-year-old mom wants prescription birth control, in most cases she needs her parents’ permission. “Only [Texas] and Utah have a law that if you’re already a parent, you are the legal medical guardian of your baby, but you cannot make your own medical decisions without the now-grandma involved,” Daverth said.
That’s part of the reason, she notes, Texas has the highest rate of repeat teen pregnancies in the country.
Emphasis mine. That’s pretty much our state in a nutshell. The problem is that any effort to deal with this necessarily begins the acknowledgment of the realities of the situation – you know, like that teens have sex and that teens who have sex without access to contraception and good information about reproductive health are much more likely to become parents than teens who do have those things – and we’re no good at that. Shame and denial is so much easier, and we live with the results of that.