With regard to rising rates of teenage motherhood: "It's more costly for youth in the Northeast to have a teen birth than for youth in the South, in terms of opportunities they'll miss," said David Landry, a researcher at the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute.
-- From "Mississippi has highest teen birth rate, CDC says" by Mike Stobbe, Associated Press 1/7/08
Mississippi now has the nation's highest teen pregnancy rate, displacing Texas and New Mexico for that lamentable title, according to a new federal report released Wednesday.
Mississippi's rate was more than 60 percent higher than the national average in 2006, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. The teen pregnancy rate in Texas and New Mexico was more than 50 percent higher.
The three states have large proportions of black and Hispanic teenagers - groups that traditionally have higher birth rates, experts noted.
The lowest teen birth rates continue to be in New England, where three states have teen birth rates at just half the national average.
Some experts have blamed the national increase on increased federal funding for abstinence-only health education that does not teach teens how to use condoms and other contraception. They said that would explain why teen birth rate increases have been detected across much of the country and not just in a few spots.
There is debate about that, however. Some conservative organizations have argued that contraceptive-focused sex education is still common, and that the new teen birth numbers reflect it is failing.
To read the entire article, CLICK HERE.
Note the biased reporting: "experts" blame abstinence-only education, while "conservatives" argue it's a failure of condom-stressing education.
