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The Truth about Teenage Birth Rates

I’m guessing most of you have heard the news about the teen birth rate. Recent figures reveal that births to teenaged women have reached the lowest point in 60 years. But don’t get your party hats out just yet.

Mary Beth Bonacci

Well, to quote a recent political figure, that’s like saying there’s no difference between the veterinarian and the taxidermist because both give you your dog back.

Why are fewer teenagers giving birth? Is it because, as one commentator speculated, that teenaged girls are more sexually conservative these days? Is it because, as sex education-types claim, that teens are conscientious users of birth control? Or is there something still more ominous behind these figures?

According to the Family Research Council, there is indeed something ominous going on. In digging around, they found the following: In 1999, there were 49.6 births for every 1,000 girls age 15-19. That’s indeed the lowest rate in 60 years. But, the question remains: how many pregnancies were there? In 1997 (the last year for which we have figures) there were 90.7 pregnancies for every 1,000 girls in the same age group.

So what happened to these other pregnancies? A certain (relatively small) percentage obviously ended in miscarriage. But a whopping 53.8 per thousand of these pregnant teenagers never showed up in the teen birth rate because they aborted their pregnancies. This, if my memory serves correctly, is an increase over previous years, when roughly one-third of pregnant teenagers deliberately terminated their pregnancies.

This, my friends, is no reason to celebrate.

Sure, it’s a good thing to have fewer teen mothers, especially of the unwed variety. But I’d rather have a world crawling with teen mothers than one in which we slice babies into pieces before they can show up in those nasty statistics.

This is why I’ve always had a bit of a problem with the anti-teen-pregnancy campaigns. You know, like the “Baby, Think It Over” dolls that cry their annoying little battery-operated cry 24 hours a day, to convince kids that having a kid themselves would be the worst thing that could happen. Sure, it’s tough to be a teen mother. Sure it changes their lives. Sure it’s not best for a baby, it’s not best for a teen mom and it’s not best for a teen dad. But how are we going to prevent it?

If a campaign focuses on pregnancy and teen motherhood as the primary problem, then the baby becomes the “enemy.” It’s not having sex that’s the problem. It’s having a baby. And what are these girls left believing? “It’s okay to have sex, just don’t have a baby.” They may contracept, they may not. If they do, it’ll probably fail at some point, as all contraceptives do. And what then?

Ask the 53.8 of every thousand girls in 1997. They’ll tell you. They went to get rid of the pregnancy. Because that, not the sex, was the real problem. And I’ll bet that most of them, if they were really honest with you and themselves, would tell you that they paid a horrendous price for it, and will continue to pay that price for the rest of their lives.

The message of chastity is so much deeper, so much more beautiful than this. It doesn’t tell us that babies are bad. It tells us that they’re good, they’re an absolutely miraculous gift from God. And they’re best served within the context of a loving, stable family.

But babies aren’t even central to the real message of chastity. We aren’t called to live respect for the gift of sexuality simply because we might get pregnant while unmarried. If that were true, infertile women would apparently have the license to do whatever they pleased sexually. But they’re not. We’re called to save sex for marriage because, on every level, it speaks a language of permanent, committed love. It says, “I give myself to you, to be at your side forever.”

Taking sex out of that context causes damage on every level. Yes, unwed pregnancy and its concurrent injustice to children is one of those. But not the only one. It also causes physical damage in the form of horrible, nasty, contagious diseases. It causes emotional scars which can and do last a lifetime. It causes a spiritual rupture between ourselves and the God who loves us, the One who gave us this amazing gift in the first place.

Reducing chastity to another form of teenage birth control is doing nobody any favors. It’s leading young girls — as well as young men — down a path bound directly for heartache. It’s hurting their ability to make good marital decisions. It’s cheapening the most beautiful gift they have. And it’s leaving their children in pieces at the bottom of a trash can.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Bonacci, Mary Beth. “The Truth about Teenage Birth Rates.” The Arlington Catholic Herald (August 24, 2000).

Published with permission of the Arlington Catholic Herald.

THE AUTHOR

Mary Beth Bonacci is the founder of Real Love Incorporated and the the author of We're on a Mission from God: The Generation X Guide to John Paul II, the Catholic Church, and the Real Meaning of Life and Real Love: The Ultimate Dating, Marriage and Sex Question Book (Ignatius, 1996).

Copyright © 2000 Arlington Catholic Herald
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