Saturday, March 06, 2004
YOUNG LOVE, NEW CAUTION: More Teenagers Are Striving for Restraint
The teenage pregnancy rate in America, which rose sharply between 1986 and 1991 to huge public alarm, has fallen steadily for a decade with little fanfare, to below any level previously recorded in the United States. And though pregnancy prevention efforts have long focused almost exclusively on girls, it is boys whose behavior shows the most startling changes.
More than half of all male high school students reported in 2001 that they were virgins, up from 39 percent in 1990. Among the sexually active, condom use has soared to 65 percent for all male students and 67 percent among black ones. The trends are similar, if less pronounced, for female students, who remain slightly less likely than boys to report that they have had sex. Nowhere are the changes more surprising than in poor minority neighborhoods like Harlem and the Bronx, which a decade ago were seen as centers of a national epidemic of teenage pregnancy.
Researchers often sum up the findings in one tidy phrase: "less sex, more contraception." But there is nothing simple about their puzzlement over the reasons.
"The default position is `Yahoo, let's have sex,' " said Sarah Brown, director of the private, nonprofit National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. "It takes some motivation in a highly sexualized culture for teenagers not to have sex. To use contraception takes a lot of motivation."
"I think there's something very profound going on. I don't think anybody understands in depth this change in teen culture."
Experts can rattle off a litany of possible reasons for the turnaround: the fear of AIDS, and the impact of AIDS-prevention education; the introduction of injectable forms of birth control; changes in welfare policy and crackdowns on fathers for child support; the rise of a more religious and conservative generation of teenagers; an economic boom with more opportunities; and an array of new youth programs, especially those stressing both abstinence and contraception.
Even advocates of these developments agree that they cannot account for the shift, or predict how long it will last. Yet the cultural changes now at work are quite astonishing when viewed up close, in the lives of teenagers themselves. In their topsy-turvy world of explicit sex and elusive intimacy, young people yearning for human contact are distilling new codes of conduct from a volatile blend of sex education, popular culture and family experience.
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