A rise in teenage pregnancy rates

for the first time since 1991

seems to have re-awakened Americans' fears

over the problem of early childbearing

This latest panic reflects the nation's

dogged denial about the role

of sexuality in adolescence

Pregnancy & Class

When a pregnancy occurs for a teenager, the girls who are poor, not headed to college, were raised by single mothers who were teen parents themselves, and are not white overwhelmingly opt to keep the baby and raise a child.

Women who choose abortion were raised by two parents, come from affluent families and graduate from college.

In the end, of the thousands of girls will find themselves pregnant, overwhelmingly, young women with the most options end their pregnancies, while the poorest and most disadvantaged ones become young mothers.

Denying the Role of Sexuality in Adolescence

The rather sobering news about a rise in pregnancy rates among teenagers for the first time since 1991 seems to have re-awakened Americans' fears over the problem of early childbearing.

According to the sociologist Frank Furstenberg, who has studied teenage pregnancy for four decades and recently published a book on the topic called Destinies of the Disadvantaged: The Politics of Teen Childbearing, this latest panic reflects the nation's dogged denial about the role of sexuality in adolescence.

Anyone who understands the basics of the birds and the bees knows what will happen when boys and girls engage in unprotected sex.

According to Furstenberg, a father and grandfather himself, Americans suffer from a puzzling wonderment when it comes to our young people and their developing sexuality.

In his book, Furstenberg offers a metaphor of driving to describe the problem with the current view.

When we prepare our young to get behind a wheel at 15- or 16-years-old: there is intensive instruction, careful monitoring, and, eventually, a time where young people get to drive a car on their own, Furstenberg says.

Driving is, potentially, a far more dangerous than having sex. And yet, as Furstenberg sees it, under the current strategy, parents rail against the inevitability of young people's sexuality by refusing to accept it as "normal and normative."

He says, "it is as if we stand back and watch young people go out on the road without any preparation," telling them simply: "try not to hit anything."

Such schizophrenic messages also gets reinforced in abstinence plus sexual education programs where teenagers are advised "not to have sex," with the proviso "to use protection if they do."

Statistical trends in young people's sexual behavior foreshadowed this increase in teen pregnancy, since 2003, contraceptive use among adolescents actually declined while the levels of sexual activity have remained constant.

Within the issue of teenage pregnancy is the unspoken sense that abortion offers a way out.

With more than a million abortions annually, and 50 percent of teenage pregnancies ending in pregnancy termination, the choice to go to term and become a mother, or not, offer the two most common "solutions" to an unplanned pregnancy for a teenager.

And yet, as far as we can see, these assorted outcomes -- abortion, adoption, or parenthood -- appear to be powerfully structured by social realities like class, race, poverty, and education.

When a pregnancy occurs for a teenager, the girls who are poor, not headed to college, were raised by single mothers who were teen parents themselves, and are not white overwhelmingly opt to keep the baby and raise a child.

Women who choose abortion were raised by two parents, come from affluent families and graduate from college.

In the end, of the thousands of girls will find themselves pregnant, overwhelmingly, young women with the most options end their pregnancies, while the poorest and most disadvantaged ones become young mothers.

It is no accident, after all, that you hardly ever see college students pushing strollers with newborns on campus.

Given the growing social acceptance of young mothers and the legal access to abortion, despite the "happy ending" of the film Juno, the reality is that adoption is a rarely considered option when pregnancy happens among teens.

A select group women, who are typically white and socially conservative, will choose this path because of their opposition to abortion and the fact that there are thousands of families eager to adopt healthy white infants.

Many poor, young women of color inhabit a social world where early childbearing is common and the reality of foster care system filled with non-white infants in need of families convinces them that children raised on public assistance will be better off than ones trapped in the foster care system.

In the flurry of headlines following the news of Jamie Lynn Spears' impending motherhood, are we shocked because Ms. Spears had sex with her boyfriend or that she had sex and failed to use contraception effectively, or that she did not have an abortion?

So how exactly can the richest country in the world deal with the issue of teen pregnancy?

For Furstenberg, the first step is to abandon the moralistic messages of the don't- have- sex -but-if-you-do-be careful campaigns.

Accept the fact that most young people will have sexual experiences and prepare them for this future. This does not simply mean handing out rainbow-colored condoms at schools; this also requires empowering young men and women to talk about sex with their partners so they can negotiate boundaries.

The subtext of the most effective programs encourages young people to wait by teaching teenagers to build sex into healthy, loving, and enduring relationships.

Indeed, in the Netherlands, where sexuality is seen as a natural and expected part of late adolescence, abortion rates are lower and the age at first sexual initiation is older than here in the United States where the federal government calls on teenagers to avoid sex until marriage.

When you look at the rest of the world where teenage childbearing has become a problem of another time, it is maddening to see policymakers and parents in the United States so perplexed.

After studying teenage childbearing for 40 years, Furstenberg has to wonder how much longer it will take for us to realize how "we are doing in the name of protecting our young people" has been such an abject failure.