A new data report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) last Friday showed that teen birth rates have declined by 9% over the course of 2016 and nearly 65% since 1991. According to researchers, the provisional birth rate for teenagers was 20.3 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 19, down from a rate of 22.3 births per 1,000.
Teen mothers are statistically are higher risk of dropping out of school, they are more likely to be dependent on public assistance after giving birth, falling below the poverty line, missing out on developing opportunities and will probably suffer from volatile and turbulent family relationships, data that is related to the strong tendency of coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. All of this according to a report called Diploma Attainment Among Teen Mothers.
Due to this situation an exponential decrease in teen birth can’t be nothing less than fantastic news to the US, fast diminishing of teen pregnancy was at first seen by experts as “a mistake” because it couldn’t be possible to reduce the rates on a 10% on just a year, as a Vox article in 2015 reported, “This drop occurred in tandem with steep declines in the abortion rate. That suggests that the drop isn’t the product of more teenagers terminating pregnancies. More simply, fewer girls are getting pregnant.”
“Putting restrictions on teens’ access to birth control could really have some profound effects on unintended births in those folks,” Dr. Elise Berlan, a physician in the section of adolescent medicine at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, told CNN, she also noted that “most teens are using some form of birth control” and the top method is “the condom, followed by withdrawal and the pill.”
Actions by the Obama administration pursued to continue with the Obamacare’s birth control mandate, increasing access and affordability of contraceptives and has also been associated to the historic drop in the abortion rate of 2014, yet it is another mandate the Trump administration wants to reverse.
