Teen Pregnancy

Recently, a friend of mine wrote a story that featured a pregnant teen. I found it interesting, her point was that hiding from the problem - or just hiding the problem - wasn't going to solve anything.

Perhaps the question is about how to bring awareness to the problem without everyone yelling about promotion of it. Is it about celebrities who are not celebrities just because they had a child as a teenager? One of said celebrities is listed as an abstinence spokesperson on wikipedia.

I read a lot of articles about teen pregnancy today. One thing I find very interesting is that most of the data saying teen pregnancy is increasing is reporting data from 2005 to 2007. Even most of the data printed in 2010 leads back to those years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/us/27teen.html
http://www.cdc.gov/Features/dsTeenPregnancy/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/25/AR2010012503957.html
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2010/12/teen_birth_rate_hits_record_lo.html

So the things that are changing in a positive way. It's still very disturbing that the US has the highest teen pregnancy rate in any industrialized nation. So what are they doing that we're not? Why isn't that the question we're asking? Why don't we figure out what's different between the cultures that have significantly lower birth rates and ours? Maybe that would make too much sense.

The media has decided to make teen pregnancy something we see- we have shows like The Secret Life of the American Teenager dedicated to showing some of the drawbacks (though they've been criticized for not showing enough about contraception and STIs) and others like 16 and Pregnant actually touted for lowering the pregnancy rate among teens in its documentary-style presentation.

Why is it, then, that so many people have mentioned to me that these television shows are promoting teens getting pregnant? Maybe because the last time they heard about teen pregnancy rates, it was before any of those shows aired, before those 'celebrities' had their babies, and years out of date. It's so tough to keep up with those statistics.