Teenage mothers
LYNSEY TULLIN was 15 when she became pregnant. The only contraception she and her boyfriend had used was wishful thinking: "I didn't think it would happen to me," she says. Tullin, who lives in Oldham in northern England, decided to keep the baby, now aged 3, although as a consequence her father has disowned her.
Tullin is not alone. In the UK nearly 3 per cent of females aged 15 to 19 became mothers in 2002, many of them unintentionally. And unplanned pregnancies are not the only consequence of teenage sex – rates of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are also rocketing in British adolescents, both male and female.
The numerous and complex societal trends behind these statistics have been endlessly debated without any easy solutions emerging. Policy makers tend to focus on the direct approach, targeting young adolescents in the classroom. In many western schools teenagers get sex education classes giving explicit information about sex and contraception. But recently there has been a resurgence of some old-fashioned advice: just say "no". The so-called abstinence movement urges teens to take virginity pledges and cites condoms only to stress their failure rate. It is sweeping the US, and is now being exported to countries such as the UK and Australia.
Confusingly, both sides claim their strategy is the one that leads to fewest pregnancies and STD cases. But a close look at the research evidence should give both sides pause for thought. It is a morally charged debate in which each camp holds entrenched views, and opinions seem to be based less on facts than on ideology. "It's a field fraught with subjective views," says Douglas Kirby, a sex education researcher for the public-health consultancy ETR Associates in Scott"s Valley, California.
For most of history, pregnancy in adolescence has been regarded not as a problem but as something that is normal, so long as it happens within marriage. Today some may still feel there is nothing unnatural about older adolescents in particular becoming parents. But in industrialized countries where extended education and careers for women are becoming the norm, parenthood can be a distinct disadvantage. Teenage mums are more likely to drop out of education, to be unemployed and to have depression. Their children run a bigger risk of being neglected or abused, growing up without a father, failing at school and abusing drugs.
The US has by far the highest number of teenage pregnancies and births in the west; 4.3 per cent of females aged between 15 and 19 gave birth there in 2002. This is significantly higher than the rate in the UK (2.8 per cent), which itself has the highest rate in Western Europe.
Another alarming statistic is the number of teenagers catching STDs. In the UK the incidences of chlamydia, syphilis and gonorrhea in under-20s have all more than doubled since 1995. The biggest rise has been in chlamydia infections in females under 20; cases have more than tripled, up to 18,674 in 2003. Chlamydia often causes no symptoms for many years but it can lead to infertility in women and painful inflammation of the testicles in men.
No surprise, then, that teenage sex and pregnancy has become a political issue. The UK government has set a target to halve the country's teen pregnancy rate by 2010, and the US government has set similar goals. But achieving these targets will not be easy. In an age when adolescence has never been so sexualized, in most western countries people often begin to have sex in their mid to late teens; by the age of 17, between 50 and 60 per cent are no longer virgins.
Since the 1960s, UK schools have increasingly accepted that many teenagers will end up having sex and have focused efforts on trying to minimize any ensuing harm. Sex education typically involves describing the mechanics of sex and explaining how various contraceptives work, with particular emphasis on condoms because of the protection they provide from many STDs.
The sex education strategy gained further support in the early 1990s when policy makers looked to the Netherlands. There, teenage birth rates have plummeted since the 1970s and are now among the lowest in Europe, with about 0.8 per cent of females aged between 15 and 19 giving birth in 2002. No one knows why for sure, as Dutch culture differs from that of the UK and America in several ways. But it is generally attributed to frank sex education in schools and open attitudes to sex. Dutch teenagers, says Roger Ingham, director of the Center for Sexual Health Research at the University of Southampton,"have less casual sex and are older when they first have sex compared with the UK".
"Why do virginity pledgers catch STDs? It's difficult to imagine intending not to have sex while also being contraceptively prepared"
But a new sexual revolution is under way. Spearheaded by the religious right, the so-called abstinence movement is based on the premise that sex outside marriage is morally wrong. "We're trying to say there's another approach to your sexuality," says Jimmy Hester, co-founder of one of the oldest pro-abstinence campaigns, True Love Waits, based in Nashville, Tennessee.
Abstinence-based education got US government backing in 1981, when Congress passed a law to fund sex education that promoted self-restraint. More money was allocated through welfare laws passed in 1996, which provided $50 million a year.
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