Teen births
It’s time to break the cycle: Texas has been a leader too long in kids having kids.
Trust me. The words amount to the worth of an unopened parachute when passion-struck teenagers take a plunge off a ravine they don’t see until it’s too late. And too many teenage girls in Texas keep going off the cliff.
Although teen birth rates have declined across the nation, geographic clusters of elevated rates remain. A new study — documenting an elevated risk throughout much of our state — signals an emergency that needs our immediate attention.
A teen living in the San Antonio, El Paso or Dallas areas is more likely to have a baby than one who lives in other parts of the country, according to June study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology. Teens in a 40-county area that includes San Antonio were 87 percent more likely to give birth than those nationwide.
These Texas clusters of higher-thanaverage teen birth rates are not random and remain higher than expected even when adjusted for poverty and education, according to the Florida researchers who analyzed county-bycounty teen birth rate data for 20062012 that were compiled by the Center for Health Statistics.
When adjusted for poverty, the Fort Worth area had a 58 percent higher teenage birth rate than the rest of the contiguous nation, and the Houston area had the sixth-highest rate for an area of over 100,000 people in the country. In Harris County, more than 5,000 teens had babies in 2015.
The study doesn’t pinpoint the additional factors contributing to high teenage birth rates. But regressive Texas policies — such as lack of sex education in schools and low access to birth control compared to teens in other parts of the country — are the likely culprits.
Parents have primary responsibility for educating their children, of course. But as the children of teen moms are more likely to give birth while they are teenagers, additional support may be necessary to effect change.
Access to birth control and robust sex education classes can help break the cycle, but current state and federal policymakers often fail to support these common-sense measures to help teens avoid pregnancy.
Just two examples: Congress is in the process of overhauling the Affordable Care Act, and funding for Planned Parenthood, a trusted source for contraceptives, is at risk. At the state level, a bill to allow 17-yearolds to gain access to contraception without their parents’ consent died last session.
Given the spotty leadership, local public officials in Texas should take matters into their own hands and meet with school leaders to share data from this study and figure out local strategies to help young women avoid unintended pregnancies. These include teaching medically accurate sex education in area schools.
Houston Independent School District already teaches abstinence-plus sexual education, curriculum that allows teens to learn how to protect themselves if they are sexually active. But many other school districts have failed to adopt thoughtful policies.
School district personnel stand on the front lines of this problem. Roughly 35,000 Texas teens give birth before they turn 20 every year, with nearly one-quarter of all teen births to teens who already have a child, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, a nonprofit.
This is about as many students as attend Texas Tech University annually. But instead of attending college or even finishing high school, many of these teen mothers drop out of school. The consequences of their poor choices are predictable.
• Nearly one-half of teenage mothers lived below the poverty line in 2010. “I tried hard not to become a teen mother, because teen moms don’t amount to much,” one woman who grew up in a disadvantaged home told us.
• More likely to drop out of the educational pipeline, teen mothers — and their children — are also more likely to need the social services pipeline. Teen childbearing cost Texas $1.1 billion in 2010, according to the National Campaign.
The personal costs to these young women and their children are even higher — the lost dreams of educational attainment, the blight of poverty and, for too many, the defeat of incarceration.
The loss of human potential is too high for adults to stick their heads in the sand any longer. There’s a fiscal imperative, sure, but also a profound moral one. Texas needs better sex education and better access to contraception. The state, too long a leader in teen births, should become a different kind of leader — one with innovative public policies that will help prevent them.