Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention
NCY POSITION
The National Collaboration for Youth believes that:
- Youth development programs that teach children life skills and social values and connect them more meaningfully to their communities, tend to result in a greater awareness of life options and a lesser likelihood of high risk behavior in all areas including early initiation of sexual intercourse.
- Participation in comprehensive sexuality education programs can help delay the onset of sexual activity and encourage the avoidance of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases for both males and females.
- Pregnant teenagers and teenage mothers should be encouraged to seek regular medical and nutritional care, to continue in school or to seek vocational training, and to enroll in parenting courses.
- Prospective fathers and teen fathers should assume financial responsibilities.
- Pregnancy prevention programs should be based on positive youth development principles and thus should:
- build children's self-reliance, self-confidence and awareness of life options; facilitate parent-child, teacher-child, mentor-child activities and communication; promote peer education and leadership in schools and in the community; increase competencies in decision-making, negotiation, assertiveness, and refusal and resistance skills.
- Fear-based approaches to adolescent pregnancy prevention are ineffective and harmful.
PUBLIC POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS
The federal government should take the following actions related to adolescent pregnancy:
- Provide leadership and incentives to campaigns attempting to reduce adolescent pregnancy through comprehensive approaches that are research-based.
- Expand funding for pregnancy prevention programs that provide medically accurate and realistic information about both abstinence and contraception.
- In light of concerns from the medical and public health communities regarding the effectiveness of abstinence-only programs, redirect the federal abstinence-only-until-marriage funding to more comprehensive research-based youth development approaches.
- Provide more evaluation dollars for current programs in an effort to determine what methods are most effective.
- Support and fund scientific research into adolescent sexual behavior.
- Provide leadership and incentives to programs attempting to reduce sexually transmitted infections through comprehensive interventions, including education, counseling, support services and treatment.
- Ensure access to affordable health care, including contraception, to all regardless of age.
- Recognize and support the role of schools in providing comprehensive health, nutrition, and sexuality education.
- Promote services that support positive social, economic, health and developmental outcomes for teen parents and their children.
- Support community efforts to increase and coordinate positive child/adolescent development programs.
- Support community programs that attempt to reach, and provide specialized services to, youth in high-risk situations or environments.
- Enact the Younger Americans Act to recognize and support the role of youth development programs as a promising approach to adolescent pregnancy prevention, and support further research on the efficacy of youth development approaches to adolescent pregnancy prevention.
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