According to the American Society for Positive Care of Children, the chances of a teen girl becoming pregnant is 90 percent within a year of being sexually active, if she’s not using birth control. The Guttmacher Institute in 2021 estimated that figure at 85 percent for all US couples who don’t use birth control.
The World Health Organization studies adolescent pregnancies around the world and lists access to birth control as a major contributing factor. Two others are poverty and educational level. When a teen’s future options are limited by economics and inadequate education in societies where motherhood is valued, pregnancy provides a means to a valued status.
Availability of contraceptives is clearly a major issue in preventing teen pregnancy worldwide. Unfortunately, teens often don’t have the knowledge or agency required to get them on their own.
From an economic standpoint, cost can be a serious impediment. A teen without money of her own has no options. Even for teens earning an income, the cost may be prohibitive.
In many states, including Oklahoma—where I taught—minors under the age of seventeen cannot get a prescription for birth control without parental consent or unless they’re married or have been pregnant. Is it just me, or is requiring a prior pregnancy a flawed approach? Kind of like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.
Aside from state legal hurdles, there are other obstacles to obtaining birth control. Among my former students, very few parents helped their daughters obtain the Pill. Of course, many of those girls never ended up in our program. Presumably, most who were offered birth control options didn’t get pregnant.
Is it a coincidence that Oklahoma makes it so difficult to obtain birth control and also has the fourth highest teen pregnancy rate in the US in 2024? I don’t think so.
Oklahoma’s relatively high teen pregnancy rate might also be influenced by the absence of any state requirement to teach sex education in schools. Individual school boards may choose to provide sex education. If they do, the only state requirement is that they promote abstinence as the only completely reliable method. True, but some school boards take that as authorization to encourage nothing but abstinence to prevent pregnancy.
As a result, many students have little information about their own reproductive health and pregnancy prevention, aside from misinformation gathered from friends, which probably explains why some girls didn’t realize or disclose their suspected pregnancy until it was too late.
Some sexually active teens rely on ineffective methods, like “pulling out,” post-coitus douches, or only moderately effective or improperly used methods, such as condoms. Some simply can’t predict when or if a sexual encounter will require planning ahead.
Further, the Pill, by far the most popular form of birth control, is not 100 percent effective if it’s not taken daily as prescribed. It was well known among my students, because the nurse on campus reminded them often, that certain antibiotics and anti-fungal drugs also interfere with birth control pills’ effectiveness.
Many of my former students told me that when their parents found out they were sexually active, they simply told them to stop. Some parents made threats against them if they continued to have sex. Neither is an effective deterrent, in my opinion. Another large percentage of students said their parents never discussed sexual activity with them at all,
A few students insisted their parents were excited by the prospect of becoming grandparents. “My mom just loves babies,” one student told me, “and she can’t have any more.”
Once a student delivered her child, our onsite nurse urged her to commit to contraception afterward. If the girl didn’t have access by other means, she was referred to the Planned Parenthood office a couple of blocks from campus. In most cases, girls chose arm implants for long-term control. They often complained about the redness and swelling after implantation, but none of them regretted the procedure.
Of course, girls who enrolled in our program had already made the choice—or in some cases, the choice was made for her by circumstance or by adults in her life—to carry her child to term. All our students valued motherhood and disparaged those who chose to end pregnancies. Whatever our personal convictions, teachers were bound to protect students and respect their choices. We supported them academically, physically, and socially, to graduation and responsible parenthood.
Janice Airhart 