Part of the Problem?
Risking the Future: Adolescent Sexuality, Pregnancy, and Childbearing. Vol. I.
by Cheryl D. Hayes.
National Academy Press. 352 pp. $21.95.
The United States is undergoing a rise in teen-age pregnancies on a scale hitherto unknown, and without equal in other industrial societies. (The closest competitor is Canada, where the number of girls under fifteen becoming pregnant is one-fourth the rate of ours.) In order to help us approach this crisis in an informed manner, and find solutions to it, the National Research Council—a creation of the National Academy of Sciences—recently brought together three panels of experts to examine the available research and make policy recommendations. The result is Risking the Future.
The study is candid about the gravity of the situation:
Regardless of one’s political or moral perspective, the basic facts are disturbing: more than 1 million teen-age girls in the United States become pregnant each year, just over 400,000 teen-agers obtain abortions, nearly half of whom have not yet reached their eighteenth birthday.
As the report goes on to state, the younger the age at which teens engage in sexual intercourse, the less likely it is that contraception will be used, which helps explain the rising rates of births and abortions at ever lower ages. Moreover, half of all teen mothers have repeat pregnancies within twenty-four months, regardless of whether they are enrolled in special birth-control programs aimed at avoiding this.
The drawbacks of motherhood at an immature age are numerous, reports the NRC: “These very young mothers have high rates of pregnancy complications including toxemia, anemia, prolonged labor, and premature labor. . . . Pregnant girls under age 15, for example, experience a rate of maternal death that is 2.5 times that for mothers ages 20-24.” Teen-age mothers also have more children than the norm, a lower likelihood of lasting marriage, a greater instability in other intimate relationships with males, lower levels of education, lower-paying jobs (if they find them), and a greater dependency on welfare than any other category of the population.
Nor is the damage limited to the mother. From the start her offspring are likely to “have higher rates of complications” due to “maternal morbidity and mortality, and premature and/or low birth-weight babies.” There are also failures of attentiveness due to maternal immaturity: “children born to teen-age mothers are more likely to be injured and hospitalized by age five.” Evidence is growing that “the age of the mother at the birth of her child does affect the child’s intelligence as measured on standardized tests,” and as a consequence such children are “at greater risk of lower intellectual and academic achievement, social behavior problems, and problems of self-control. In addition, data suggest that they may be more likely to become adolescent parents themselves than are the children of older mothers.”
All the relevant figures are dramatically worse for blacks, with dire consequences for their economic condition. In 1981 the rate of births for girls under fifteen years of age was 2.7 per thousand for whites, 20.2 for blacks; the rate of abortions for girls under fifteen was 5.1 for whites, 27.0 for blacks. For the age category fifteen-to-nineteen, the rate per thousand of births among whites jumps to 44.7, but among blacks to 96.9.
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When it comes to recommendations, the authors of Risking the Future make clear their preference for government action. They propose an aggressive campaign for contraception, with emphasis on the pill. In their judgment the public schools should be included as distribution agencies for contraceptives, and abortion or adoption referrals (free of parental consent) should be offered to adolescent girls not disposed to keep their offspring or to carry their pregnancies to term.
The first and most obvious problem with these recommendations is that they ignore, even abuse, values held by much, and probably most, of the American public. The authors of Risking the Future are not ignorant of the feelings of Americans, but they cite the origins of those feelings (“We are a diverse society of individuals, families, and communities with differing values, traditions, and cultures”) only to use them as an argument against telling adolescents why sexual restraint might be desirable. It is noteworthy, however, that even within the report itself, one of the three panels of experts, that on Adolescent Pregnancy and Child-bearing, can be found giving many reasons why the delay of coitus in young adolescents is advisable, and offering none in favor of its inception—a conclusion which happens to coincide with the view of most parents of virtually every faith and cultural constituency, though not with the authors of Risking the Future.
This is not the only occasion where the study offers facts and arguments that contradict the logic of its own recommendations. The authors admit, for instance, that convincing fourteen-year-olds to use contraceptives is a daunting task, since “young teen-agers are handicapped in assessing the personal risk of pregnancy because of their cognitive immaturity.” Nor can this fundamental obstacle be overcome by formal instruction: “Since many are still incapable of thinking abstractly and relating actions to specific consequences—particularly when their early personal experience is contrary to what they have learned—they have a difficult time planning for sexual intercourse and using contraception.” No birth-control method, furthermore, is immune from natural or human failings.
Since pregnancy due to contraceptive failure will issue either in abortion or in birth, with the former (according to the report) raising the chances of future infertility, and the latter (also according to the report) increasing the risk of death to a young mother by 250 percent; since early childbearing entails marital and career deprivation, physical, intellectual, and social harm to children, and a burden of welfare expenditures to be borne by the rest of society; since there are accelerating risks of venereal disease such as herpes and AIDS, the first of which is incurable, the second fatal—for all these reasons one would think it a morally responsible course of action to urge educators and other adult authorities to state such facts bluntly to the young and admonish them against early intercourse. The report, nevertheless, declines to do so.
To be sure, the authors do not entirely omit reference to the role of moral suasion in preventing teen-age pregnancy; it would, no doubt, be impossible to avoid mentioning so obvious and historically powerful a tool in controlling sexual conduct. But the idea is not given serious attention, on the perfectly circular grounds that few “programs” based on moral suasion exist and hence “there is little evidence to document their effectiveness.” By contrast, for programs encouraging contraception “the scientific base is much greater, and programs can be based on the demonstrated effectiveness of contraceptive use.”
And yet, one is tempted to ask, however futilely, if numbers and “demonstrated effectiveness” are to rule the argument, why not look at the experience of Japan, or Ireland, or Portugal, or even China, where rates of teen-age pregnancy are nonexistent by comparison with ours, for the simple reason that in their various ways the adults in those societies make it clear to the young that coitus at age fourteen is not acceptable behavior? Or why not look at the “demonstrated effectiveness” of religious belief, which even in Risking the Future is offered in evidence?
Religiousness appears to be an important factor distinguishing early from later initiators of sexual activity. Devaney and Hubley (1981) found that women ages 15-19 were more likely to be sexually active if they were not regular church attenders and if they reported that religion was not very important to them. These findings are supported by numerous other studies. . . . Most researchers who have addressed this issue have found that the tendency to be devout and observant of religious custom and teaching is more important than any specific religious affiliation.
It would not require prodigies of inferential reasoning to devise nonreligious sex-education policies in tune with all this evidence. As Secretary of Education William Bennett put it in criticizing Risking the Future: “When it comes to the well-being of our children, there are certain precepts to which virtually all Americans adhere. For example, I have never had a parent tell me that he or she would be offended by a teacher telling a class that it is better to postpone sex. Or that marriage is the best setting for sex, and in which to have and raise children.”
Offended by the affirmation of such values, apparently, leading opinion-makers prefer the myth that some biological determinism bars the way to standards of sexual temperance among the young, or that teen sex is beyond adult control or influence, and hence must be somehow appeased and accommodated. Thus, in the preface to Risking the Future, Dr. Daniel D. Fiederman asserts his own and his colleagues’ view that “the potentially or actually pregnant teen-ager should be treated kindly and warmly and should have a complete set of options available without the interposition of moral hounding or economic barriers,” and that until poverty, youth unemployment, poor education, and sexually provocative television programs are eliminated from American society, “the panel urges prevention rather than denial, kindness rather than exhortation, and research rather than doctrine.”
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As long as “a full set of options” is to include sex at thirteen and abortion on demand, free of “moral hounding” or even “exhortation,” we are likely to remain on our present path. In that case, the prognosis is that 40 percent of today’s fourteen-year-old girls, by the time they are nineteen, will have become pregnant. No modern society has contemplated how it can endure such a breakdown of family norms, or by what means the resulting chaos will be subsidized. For its part in perpetuating an official acquiescence in the present state of affairs, often in the face of evidence adduced in its own pages, Risking the Future reveals itself to be another symptom of the problem it sets out to address.
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