Helping teenagers avoid negative consequences of sexual activity

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), May, 1996 by Jeannie I. Rosoff

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NO ONE CAN DENY that teenage pregnancy is a serious issue. Births to girls too young to care properly for a baby represent both individual and societal tragedies. Yet, society seems unable to develop realistic responses to the problem. This is due, in part, to the fact that rhetoric often serves to obscure the issue.

Indeed, the claims are confusing, if not downright contradictory. Teenage pregnancies are reported to be "soaring," yet their number has remained relatively stable over the last 10 years or so and is considerably lower than in previous decades. "Babies are having babies," trumpet talk show hosts, yet most births to teenagers are to 18- and 19-year-old women. The public, according to opinion polls, believes that the preponderance of the 1,500,000 abortions that take place each year are to teenage girls and that they account, as well, for the majority of births out of wedlock. However these perceptions have come about, the data show that they are wrong, on both counts. Yet, teenage pregnancy, while a personal and social problem, routinely is cited both as the end result of all that is wrong in American society and as a major source of all social ills.

Teenage pregnancies and births also are held to be the basis of welfare dependency, and politicians currently are trying to outdo each other in their attempts to alleviate the situation. Among the proposed remedies are restoring the value of sexual abstinence, promoting marriage to make out-of-wedlock pregnancies legitimate, and prohibiting public assistance to teenage mothers under the age of 18 who fail to marry. How many young mothers under 18 actually are receiving welfare checks? Not "hundreds of thousands," as claimed recently by one of the country's most respected newspapers, but 32,000 nationwide. This well may be too many, but could "solving" the problem, assuming that the remedies proposed could do the job, truly be expected to put this country "back on the right track"?

Perhaps what is needed, first, is to define the issue. It is not that many more girls are becoming mothers in their teens than in the past. They are not. Is it that, when they do, they often choose not to marry the father? Even if they do, these youthful marriages are likely to be unstable and impermanent. Is it because they failed to use contraception, or contraception failed them? Or is it because they had sex in the first place, or sex out of marriage?

In U.S. society, much sexual activity does occur outside of marriage. Most Americans today engage in sexual relationships prior to marriage, in between marriages, after divorce or widowhood, or when they choose to remain single altogether, although research shows them to be overwhelmingly faithful to their spouses when in a stable union. It also is a fact that accidental pregnancies are extremely common, some among the married, many more among the unmarried. Of the roughly 4,500,000 pregnancies that take place each year, slightly more than half are unplanned and about 1,500,000 are disruptive or unwanted enough to end in abortion. Given the fact that close to 30% of all births--most to adult women, not teenagers--now occur outside of formal wedlock, it also is clear that an increasing number of women choose to become mothers when marriage is not a likely or promising prospect. Because half of all marriages end in divorce, it tends to blur the differences between the life circumstances of children born in or out of wedlock since the result is increasingly the same--a childhood or a good part of childhood in a single-parent family with its attendant financial and social disadvantages. While these trends are disturbing and a legitimate source of concern, they attract relatively little public ire or condemnation. Neither do they prompt the kind of benign or, alternatively, draconian remedies that sexual activity among teenagers seems to elicit.

Children are not adults. They are, at least under the age of 18, still the legal, financial, and moral responsibility of their parents. Not only their parents, but the community as a whole, have, or should have, a vested interest in their getting a good start in life--acquiring an education, obtaining adequate job training, establishing themselves financially, and, eventually, forming families of their own. They are our collective future and we have a collective investment in their well-being. Sexual activity, with its attendant hazards at all ages--including disease and accidental pregnancy--may have particularly destructive consequences for the very young, shaping prematurely the very course of their lives. Thus, public concern is valid and warranted.

Adolescents today, in spite of their occasional experimentations or temporary rebellions, appear to share their parents' values and aspirations for life. Young people increasingly spend part or all of their childhood in single-parent or "blended" families, and research shows that the deleterious consequences on children, including the likelihood of early sexual activity and pregnancy, are higher in each type. Nowadays, both parents usually work and children tend to have less consistent adult assistance and supervision. The role of the media, particularly television, is pervasive, and the depiction of sex and violence is ubiquitous at virtually all hours of the day. Violence is a commonplace experience in many communities, not in the inner city alone. Drugs often are available at high schools or even at junior high schools.