U.S. Teen Pregnancies Often Result Of 'Inability To Talk' About Sex, Opinion Piece Says

Main Category: Pregnancy / Obstetrics
Also Included In: Pediatrics / Children's Health;  Sexual Health / STDs
Article Date: 10 Oct 2008 - 11:00 PDT

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Although many "[s]ympathetic" politicians and commentators concur with Republican vice presidential nominee Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's reference to her 17-year-old daughter Bristol's pregnancy as a "normal 'up and down' of family life," teen pregnancy is "far from inevitable" and a "result in part from our inability to talk honestly and wisely about teen sexuality," Amy Schalet, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, writes in a Washington Post opinion piece.

According to Schalet, the increasing rate of teen pregnancies in the U.S. is "exacerbated by policies" supported by Palin and others that "inhibit teens from making conscious choices about sex and using contraception effectively." Schalet writes that policies such as abstinence-only education are "built on the myth of a past when people did not have sex until they were married," but "for more than half a century, the majority of Americans have been having premarital sex." She adds that compared with the 1950s, when one in three teenage mothers conceived out of wedlock, the "circumstances and aspirations of young people have changed, ... but our society's narratives about the place of sexuality and the nature of relationships do not reflect these changes." Schalet writes that the U.S. "pay[s] a price for that inability to talk realistically about teenage sexuality and love."

U.S. teens lack an environment such as that in Dutch society, "in which young people receive support from parents and other adults as they learn about relationships and wise sexual choices," Schalet writes, noting that family physicians and clinics in the Netherlands began making contraceptives easily accessible to young people in the 1960s and that the country now has one of the lowest teen pregnancy and abortion rates of any developed country. Teen pregnancy rates in the Netherlands are six times lower than in the U.S., Schalet writes, adding that U.S. teens often "feel sex is a secret that can ruin their lives."

The Palins "deserve credit for their public embrace" of their daughter's pregnancy, Schalet writes, concluding that if such an embrace "allays fears that prompt girls to keep sex a secret from their parents, then the Republican Party may have, inadvertently, facilitated the honest conversations we need to move beyond the myth-only approach to adolescent sexuality" (Schalet, Washington Post, 10/9).

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