Jamie Lynn Spears, Britney’s kid sister and Nickelodeon star, is pregnant at 16. It’s tempting to dismiss the news as mere tabloid fodder, except that it happens to coincide with a truly disturbing trend: U.S. teenagers are having more babies again.

The rising teen birth rate is a portent of growing poverty and social disorder in America. Reversing it must be among the next president’s top social priorities.

That will require moving beyond the polarizing teen sexuality debates that have marked the Bush years. Our country needs new approaches based not on ideological or moral preconceptions, but on what actually works to reduce teen pregnancy and births.

The National Center for Health Statistics reported last month that the birth rate for girls aged 15-19 increased three percent between 2005 and 2006, the first such increase in 15 years. The bad news triggered a Pavlovian frenzy of finger-pointing by Washington pressure groups.

Liberal activists and think tanks pounced quickly, citing the figures as proof that abstinence-only education programs, which President Bush and the religious right have championed, aren’t working. Conservatives duly fired back, blaming liberals’ alleged preference for value-neutral sex education and contraceptives. But this “no-sex-versus-safe-sex” debate obscures a few pertinent facts.

First, people who closely study such trends, like the experts at the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, admit that they don’t know why the increase occurred. Data on teen sexual activity, contraceptive use, pregnancy and abortion aren’t yet available. Second, there’s scant evidence that programs of any kind have a big impact on teen pregnancy and births, for good or ill. Campaign officials say pop culture images that bombard U.S. teens 24-7 likely dwarf public policy.

Nonetheless, research suggests that a limited number of programs do strengthen community-based efforts to prevent or delay sex and improve contraceptive use among sexually active teens. What may be more important, changes in law and public policy can strongly reinforce (or weaken) cultural norms that affect individual behavior. For example, some analysts believe President Clinton’s stress on work, personal responsibility and limits on welfare contributed to the sharp reduction (35 percent) in teen births since the early 1990s. Welfare reform sent a clear message to young girls: don’t count on indefinite public assistance if you drop out of school and have a baby. Parallel steps to toughen child enforcement likewise signaled baby daddies that henceforth it would be harder to evade their parental responsibilities.

Such social cues are critical, because births to teen mothers trigger and sustain the cycle of welfare dependency, crime and intergenerational poverty in America. Children growing up in lone-parent families are six times more likely to be poor than those in two-parent families. They are also more likely to drop out of school, run afoul of the law and become unwed mothers themselves.

The next president can forge a new political consensus for tackling teen pregnancy by embracing two key reforms. First, public programs ought to stress “abstinence first,” not “abstinence only.” Abstinence is the right message for very young teens, and a wise choice for many older ones as well. In some religious communities, it might be the only acceptable way to broach the delicate subject of teen sexuality. Nonetheless, nearly half of U.S. high school students say they have had sex. More complete sex education, including strong encouragement for teens to delay sex and honest and accurate counseling and information on contraception and sexually transmitted diseases, must be available to all who want it. Congressional Democrats have introduced a slew of bills to fund such classroom efforts (many of which also include education on abstinence) as well as community-based programs that engage young people in constructive behavior.

Second, Washington should fund what works, not what professional advocates on either side want. Rather than favoring one approach over the other, as the Bush administration unfortunately did, the next President should ask Congress to put all the money for abstinence, sex education and related services into one pot. States could apply for “challenge grants” to fund programs that have a measurable impact on rates of teen pregnancy and child birth. One example is the widely-replicated Teen Outreach Program, which enrolls youth in community service projects.

This approach would allow states to make choices about the programs that best suit local conditions and mores. But those choices would be constrained by a rigorous empiricism that gives Americans greater confidence that their taxes are being used to actually solve the nation’s problems, not advance the goals of one set of cultural warriors over another.

This entry was posted on 2.18.2008 at 10:34 pm and is filed under Economic Opportunity, Helping Families, Ending Poverty. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response.