Word: pregnants
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Among the underclass in America's urban ghettos, the trends are especially disturbing. Nearly half of black females in the U.S. are pregnant by age 20. The pregnancy rate among those ages 15 to 19 is almost twice what it is among whites. Worse still, nearly 90% of the babies born to blacks in this age group are born out of wedlock; most are raised in fatherless homes with little economic opportunity. "When you look at the numbers, teenage pregnancies are of cosmic danger to the black community," declares Eleanor Holmes Norton, law professor at Georgetown University and a leading...
...point of comparison, AGI investigators looked at five other Western countries in detail: Sweden, Holland, France, Canada and Britain (see chart). Though American adolescents were no more sexually active than their counterparts in these countries, they were found to be many times as likely to become pregnant. And while black teenagers in the U.S. have a higher pregnancy rate than whites, whites alone had nearly double the rate of their British and French peers and six times the rate of the Dutch. Observes AGI President Jeannie Rosoff: "It's not a black problem. It's not just an East Coast...
...marriage, when nearly a quarter of 18-and 19-year-old females were wedded. The overwhelming majority of teen births in the '50s thus occurred in a connubial context, and mainly to girls 17 and over. Twenty and 30 years ago, if an unwed teenager should, heaven forbid, become pregnant, chances are her parents would see that she was swiftly married off in a shotgun wedding. Or, if marriage was impractical, the girl would discreetly disappear during her confinement, the child would be given up for adoption, and the matter would never be discussed again in polite company. Abortion...
...illegitimate. By 1983 more than half were, and in some regions of the country, the figure exceeds 75%. Unwed motherhood has become so pervasive that "we don't use the term illegitimate anymore," notes Sister Bertille Prus, executive director of Holy Family Services, a Los Angeles adoption agency for pregnant teens...
...scientific facts of reproduction as they were in the days when Doris Day, not Madonna, was their idol. In a study funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Demographer Ellen Kisker of Princeton University found that teenage girls are awash in misinformation. Among the commonest myths: that they could not become pregnant the first time they had sex, if they had it only occasionally or if they had it standing up. Adolescents are especially foggy on the subject of contraception. A National Opinion Research Center survey of teenage mothers found that few were familiar with the IUD, and most, says Researcher...