“Diversity” marches on.
Mississippi now has the nation’s highest teen birth rate, displacing Texas and New Mexicofor that lamentable title, a new federal report says. Mississippi’srate was more than 60 percent higher than the national average in 2006,according to new state statistics released Wednesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The teen birth rate for that year in Texas and New Mexico was more than 50 percent higher.
Thethree 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 rates at roughly half the national average, which is 42 births per 1,000 teen women.
It’snot clear why Mississippi, with 68 births per 1,000, surged into firstplace. The state’s one-year increase of nearly 1,000 teen births couldbe a statistical blip, said Ron Cossman, a Mississippi State University researcher who focuses on children’s health statistics.
The New Mexico rate was 64 per 1,000; Texas was 63. New Hampshire, with a rate of 19 per 1,000, was the nation’s lowest.
Morethan a year ago, a preliminary report on the 2006 data revealed thatthe U.S. teen birth rate had risen for the first time in about 15years. But the new numbers provide the first state-by-state breakdown.
The new report is based on a review of all the birth certificates in 2006. Significant increases in teen birth rates were noted in 26 states.
“It’s pretty much across the board” nationally, said Brady Hamilton, a CDC statistician who worked on the report.
About435,000 of the nation’s 4.3 million births in 2006 were to mothers ages15 through 19. That was about 21,000 more teen births than in 2005.
Numerically, the largest increases were in the states with the largest populations. California, Texas and Florida together generated almost 30 percent of the nation’s extra teen births in 2006.
Someexperts have blamed the national increase on increased federal fundingfor abstinence-only health education that does not teach teens how touse condoms and other contraception. They said that would explain whyteen birth rate increases have been detected across much of the countryand not just in a few spots.
There isdebate about that, however. Some conservative organizations have arguedthat contraceptive-focused sex education is still common, and that thenew teen birth numbers reflect it is failing.
Otherfactors include the escalating cost of some types of birth control andtheir unavailability in some communities, said Stephanie Birch, whodirects maternal and child health programs for the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services.
Glowingmedia portrayals of celebrity pregnancies don’t help, either, she said.”They make it out to be very glamorous,” said Birch, who cited acalculation by Alaska officials that teen births were up 6 percent inthat state in 2006.
A variety offactors influence teen birth rates, including culture, poverty andracial demographics. For those and other reasons, kids in mostly white New England likely would delay child birth, said David Landry, a researcher at the Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based organization which supports abortion rights and gathers research on sexual and reproductive health.
“It’smore costly for youth in the Northeast to have a teen birth than foryouth in the South, in terms of opportunities they’ll miss,” he said.
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On the Net:
CDC report: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr57/nvsr57_07.pdf