On Wednesday the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the teen birth rate in the United States increased in 2006 for the first time in 14 years, and unmarried childbearing reached a new record high: 38.5 percent of all U.S. births. (The CDC's report is based on data from the nearly 4.3 million births in the United States last year.) Between 2005 and 2006, the teen birth rate rose from 40.5 to 41.9 live births per 1,000 Americans aged 15 to 19. The increase was highest among black teens, at 5 percent. Hispanic teens had a 2 percent increase, and non-Hispanic white teens were in the middle at 3 percent. Until this year the teen birth rate had been decreasing steadily from its all-time peak in 1991.
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Over the time period when this group of young people has come of age, we have been funneling our federal dollars into abstinence-only programs. Since 1996 we've spent $1.5 billion on abstinence-only until-marriage programs, between state and federal dollars. If these programs talk about contraception, they only talk about it in terms of its failure rates. That is a trend we can point to. Whether or not that has impacted these rates, we don't know that. The only federal program for sex education is abstinence-only until-marriage. It's really accelerated since 2000-1.
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As to these abstinence-only programs, there's no evidence these programs work in any way to delay sexual activity or encourage young people to use contraceptives.
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