Teen Pregnancy Update

New study finds dramatic increase in teen pregnancies.
An alarming analysis from the Guttmacher Institute regarding the rate of teen pregnancy received national attention yesterday, with a total of more than three minutes combined devoted to the subject on the nightly news broadcasts. ABC World News (1/26, story 5, 0:30, Sawyer) reported, "Teen pregnancies are on the rise again, after several years of decline." The teen pregnancy rate "rose 3% in 2006," which "means about 7% of American teenage girls got pregnant in that year." NBC Nightly News (1/16, story 7, 0:30, Williams) reported, "The rate was up among all ethnic groups with the rate for black and Hispanic teenagers significantly higher than for whites." The CBS Evening News (1/26, story 5, 2:15, Couric) interviewed researcher Lawrence Finer, who "blame[s] the uptick on sex education in the classroom or the lack of it." Finder notes that the increase occurred "at the same time that we've seen a substantial increase in funding for abstinence-only education programs." CBS also covered the story on their website.
Finer's claim was echoed by Heather Boonstra, a Guttmacher senior public policy associate. According to Time (1/27, Luscombe), Boonstra pointed to "a strong body of research" which demonstrated that "these programs do not work." She added that the "heyday of this failed experiment" had been defeated by "the enactment of a new teen pregnancy prevention initiative that ensures that programs will be age-appropriate, medically accurate and, most importantly, based on research demonstrating their effectiveness." However, as the Orange County Register (1/27, Hall) points out in their "Healthy Living" blog, the Senate version of the healthcare reform bill contains "$50 million a year for abstinence-only programs, a provision tucked in even after the Obama administration had hacked out funding for abstinence-only programs in favor of other teen pregnancy-prevention programs."