Teen birth rate rises in 2007 for second year in a row

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Published by viorel on December 23rd, 2009 in

healthMore babies were born to teen mothers in 2007 than the previous year, making it the second year in a row that the teen birth rate has seen an increase, according to the Centers for Disease Control's National Center for Health Statistics.

 

Teen births increased 5% between 2005 and 2007, the last year for which statistics are available, WebMD.com reports. There had been a 34% drop in births from 1991 to 2005.

 

In 2007, the birth rate among teens rose 1%, which means 42.5 babies were born for every 1,000 teens aged 15-19, according to WebMD.

 

The overall birth rate also saw a 1% increase, and overall life expectancy for a child born in 2007 reached a record high of 77.9 years, according to CDC statistics.

 

Speaking to WebMD.com, John Santelli, MD. MPH, chair of Columbia University's Clinical Population and Family Health Department, attributed the rise in teen pregnancy to the shift away from public health campaigns promoting AIDS awareness and condom use to "abstinence-only" education.

 

“We have raised a generation of young people who don’t have basic information about contraception,” he told the Web site.

 

“We certainly don’t want to see this upward trend continue,” CDC chief of reproductive statistics Stephanie J. Ventura, MA, told WebMD. “Even though we have made a lot of progress in this area, we still have a long way to go. The birth rate among teens in the U.S. is still much higher than in most other developed countries.”

Source: nydailynews.com

 

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