That’s nearly 750,000 teen pregnancies a year. About twenty-five percent of teen moms have a second child within twenty-four month of their first child. The United States has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the Western industrialized world. Teens had fewer babies in 2010 than in any other year since the mid-1940s. A sexually active teen that doesn’t use contraceptives has a ninety percent chance of becoming pregnant within a year. In 2011, the teen birthrate in the United States fell to the lowest level recorded in nearly seventy years of tracking teen reproduction. In 2012, a total of 305,388 babies were born to women aged fifteen to nineteen years, for a live birth rate of 29.4 per 1,000 women in this age group. This is a record low for U.S. teens in this age group, and a decline of six percent from 2011. Birth rates fell eight percent for women aged fifteen to seventeen years, and five percent for women ages eighteen to nineteen years. While reasons for the declines are not clear, teens seem to be less sexually active, and more of those who are sexually active seem to be using birth control than in previous …show more content…
taxpayers for increased health care and foster care, increased custody rates among children of teen parents, and lost tax revenue because of lower educational completion and income among teen mothers. Pregnancy and birth are significant contributors to high school drop out rates among girls. Only about fifty percent of teen mothers receive a high school diploma by twenty-two years of age, versus approximately ninety percent of women who had not given birth during adolescence. The children of teenage mothers are more likely to have lower school achievement and drop out of high school, have more health problems, be confined at some time during adolescence, give birth as a teenager, and face unemployment as a young adult. In 2013, there were 26.5 births for every 1,000 adolescent females age fifteen to nineteen, or 273,105 babies born to females in this age group. Nearly eighty-nine percent of these births occurred outside of marriage. The 2013 teen birth rate indicates a decline of ten percent from 2012 when the birth rate was 29.4 per one thousand. The teen birth rate has declined almost continuously over the past twenty years. In 1991, the U.S. teen birth rate was 61.8 births for every one thousand adolescent females, compared with 26.5 births for every 1,000 adolescent females in 2013. Still, the U.S. teen birth rate is higher than that of many other developed countries, including