Teen-Age Pregnancy

The heavy price of teen-age pregnancy paid by too many young mothers, fathers, infants--and society--was outlined in distressing detail in a recent series on teen-age pregnancy by staff writer Lynn Smith.

For the most part the stories outlined despair, disappointment, ignorance and broken lives filled with regret and drastically reduced chances for happiness and success. But the stories were enlightening. Thought-provoking. And disturbing. That’s good, because teen-age pregnancies are on the rise and the community needs to be enlightened, disturbed--and provoked into action if more pregnancies are to be prevented and young lives saved.

Consider the grim statistics. In the United States each year, 96 out of every 1,000 girls between 15 and 19 become pregnant, four out of every five of them by mistake. That gives the United States one of the highest teen-age birth rates among the world’s industrialized nations.

The number of sexually active teen-agers has been growing steadily. Today 49% of all 15- to 19-year-olds are sexually active. If the rate continues to rise, 40% of all 14-year-old girls in the United States today will be pregnant before they are 20.

The future for them is frightful. In California, about eight out of every 10 pregnant teen-age girls drop out of high school. So do about 40% of teen fathers. If the teen-agers marry, their chances of separating or divorcing are three time greater than for couples in their 20s.

Because they drop out of school, they can expect much lower incomes for the rest of their lives--and taxpayers can expect to help pay the cost of that. Nearly 60% of California’s total welfare budget goes to women who had teen-age pregnancies. A 10% increase in the number of teen mothers finishing high school could save California taxpayers $53 million in welfare payments.

About half of the state’s teen-age mothers choose abortion to end unwanted pregnancies. Babies born to teen-age mothers are more likely to die in their first year of life than those born to older women. The death rate for teen-age mothers is also considerably higher, and their attempted suicide rate is seven times greater than the national average.

Those statistics, shocking as they are, won’t stop teen-age pregnancies and the costly, demoralizing circumstances that too often accompany them. But more sex-education and family planning programs might. So might more school district programs that help pregnant teen-agers finish their schooling.

It would also help to identify pregnant adolescents so they could receive the counseling, educational programs and medical care they need. According to Smith’s research, only 300 of the estimated 3,000 pregnant teen-agers in Orange County are enrolled in the few school programs available for pregnant minors. The other 2,700 are out of school, somewhere. The community owes them, and the teen-agers who could avoid a similar plight with more knowledge and attention, more help than they have been receiving thus far.