plus 3, After Long Decline, Teenage Pregnancy Rate Rises - New York Times

After Long Decline, Teenage Pregnancy Rate Rises - New York Times
Bulge in teen pregnancy rate - New York Post
Millions of women at risk of malaria during pregnancy - Science News
Flame Retardant Exposure Can Reduce Chance of Pregnancy By Up to 50 ... - EmpowHer

After Long Decline, Teenage Pregnancy Rate Rises - New York Times

Posted: 26 Jan 2010 09:38 PM PST

After more than a decade of declining teenage pregnancy, the pregnancy rate among girls ages 15 to 19 increased 3 percent from 2005 to 2006 — a turnaround likely to intensify the debate over federal financing for abstinence-only sex education.

The teenage abortion rate also crept up for the first time in more than a decade, rising 1 percent from 2005 to 2006, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit research group.

"It's very disturbing," said Sarah Brown, of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. "We had over a decade of progress on a very serious problem, and I worry that we've ground to a halt. I think there are a lot of different factors at play, from less use of contraception, maybe because of less fear of AIDS, to our anything-goes culture, where it's O.K. to get pregnant and have a baby in your teens."

While teenage pregnancy rates for whites remain far lower than for blacks and Hispanics, the pregnancy rates increased for all three groups.

As previously reported, births to young women ages 15 to 19 — a statistic that is available more quickly than pregnancy and abortion data — rose from 2005 to 2006, and again from 2006 to 2007.

Since the teenage pregnancy rate is made up of births, abortions and miscarriages, it is likely that the teenage pregnancy rate rose from 2006 to 2007, as well.

But several experts said it was too soon to predict whether teenage pregnancy and birth rates would continue to rise, and revert to the record high levels of the 1980s and early 1990s.

The Guttmacher analysis examined federal data on teenage sex, births and abortion, along with the institute's own abortion statistics.

While it is difficult to pinpoint precisely how different factors influence teenage sexual behavior, some experts speculate that the rise in teenage pregnancy might be partly attributable to the $150 million a year of federal financing for sex education that emphasized abstinence until marriage, avoiding all mention of the possible benefits of contraception.

"This new study makes it crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work," said Cecile Richards, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

The Clinton administration began financing abstinence-only programs as part of welfare reform, but such programs got a large boost in the Bush administration.

The Obama administration has moved away from abstinence-only programs, creating a new teenage-pregnancy initiative in which most financing will go to programs that have been shown to prevent pregnancy, with some experimental approaches.

Meanwhile, there are continuing efforts to reinstate financing for abstinence-only education as part of the health-reform legislation.

Lawrence Finer, director of domestic research for the Guttmacher Institute, said there was evidence that adolescent use of contraceptives had plateaued, or declined, adding that it was "an interesting coincidence" that this had happened just as the focus on abstinence-only education had left fewer students getting comprehensive sex education.

Advocates of abstinence-only education, however, had a different view.

"While this recent uptick is certainly disconcerting, it would be disingenuous to try to ascribe it abstinence education or any other single factor," said Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association. "The overly sex-saturated culture certainly plays a part, with teen sex communicated almost as an expected rite of passage, without consequences, and that's a dangerous message for young people, who tend to be risk-takers anyway."

According to the Guttmacher analysis, the teenage pregnancy rate declined 41 percent from its peak, in 1990, when there were 116.9 pregnancies per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19, and 2005, when there were only 69.5 per 1,000. In 2006, the rate rose to 71.5 pregnancies for 1,000 women.

Teenage birth and abortion rates also declined in that period, with births dropping 35 percent from 1991 to 2005 and teenage abortion declining 56 percent between its peak, in 1988, and 2005.

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Bulge in teen pregnancy rate - New York Post

Posted: 26 Jan 2010 12:31 AM PST

WASHINGTON -- Teen pregnancy rates in the United States rose in 2006 for the first time in more than a decade, a think tank reports today.

The overall teen-pregnancy rate was up 3 percent in 2006, with a 4 percent rise in the rate of births and a 1 percent rise in the rate of abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute report.

"We're not quite sure yet whether this is just a blip or whether it's the beginning of a longer upward trend," said Larry Finer, Guttmacher's director of domestic research.

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Millions of women at risk of malaria during pregnancy - Science News

Posted: 24 Jan 2010 03:57 PM PST

Roughly 125 million women worldwide get pregnant in malarial regions each year, exposing them to a wide range of complications, researchers report online January 26 in PLoS Medicine.

The new study is the first to put a solid number on this high-risk population, says coauthor Feiko ter Kuile, a physician and medical epidemiologist at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in England. The 125 million pregnancies were tallied in malarial zones in 2007 and constituted roughly 60 percent of all pregnancies worldwide that year.

Women who contract malaria during pregnancy can develop anemia and carry the malaria infection for longer than usual because the parasite hides in the placenta. This allows parasites to evade immune detection.

The risks are even greater for fetuses. Malaria parasites infesting red blood cells in the placenta rob a fetus of oxygen and nutrients. The result is a heightened rate of miscarriage, stillbirth and low-birth-weight babies, ter Kuile says. Babies born to mothers with malaria often fall prey to other infections as newborns, he says.

The malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium falciparum, a tropical scourge, causes the most severe disease. But the parasite Plasmodium vivax actually threatens more people with malaria worldwide, infesting subtropical and temperate zones. What's more, certain medications against P. vivax are not recommended for pregnant women, limiting treatment options.

The best approach is to give pregnant women in malarial zones a protective course of safe drugs to prevent the disease, ter Kuile says, in particular the artemisinins. Further studies will attempt to clarify how many women worldwide actually contract malaria during pregnancy, he says.

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Flame Retardant Exposure Can Reduce Chance of Pregnancy By Up to 50 ... - EmpowHer

Posted: 26 Jan 2010 11:08 AM PST

Flame Retardant Exposure Can Reduce Chance of Pregnancy By Up to 50%, Researchers Say

TUESDAY, Jan. 26 (HealthDay News) -- Women who are exposed to a common chemical that's used as a flame retardant may take longer to become pregnant, a new study finds.

The chemicals, called PBDEs (polybrominated diphenyl ethers), are found in a variety of products including foam furniture, electronics, fabrics, carpets, plastics and other common household items and have been linked to a variety of health problems, researchers say.

"Women with high PBDE levels were 30 to 50 percent less likely to become pregnant in any given month than women with lower levels," said lead researcher Kim Harley, an adjunct assistant professor of maternal and child health and associate director of the Center for Children's Environmental Health Research at the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health.

"Although these chemicals are being phased out of new products, they will be around for a long time," she added.

The report is published in the Jan. 26 issue of Environmental Health Perspectives.

For the study, Harley's team measured PBDE levels in blood samples from 223 pregnant women who took part in a study at the Center for the Health Assessment of Mothers and Children of Salinas, which looked at environmental exposures and reproduction.

Among these women, concentrations of PBDEs were slightly lower than in the general U.S. population. The researchers speculate that this may be due to the fact that many of the women grew up in Mexico where exposure to PBDEs are limited.

Limiting their analysis to women who were trying to become pregnant, Harley's group found that women with high levels of PBDE in their blood were half as likely to become pregnant in any given month. In fact, for every tenfold increase in blood levels of PBDEs, the odds of becoming pregnant were reduced 30 percent.

These findings held even after the researchers took into account exposure to pesticides, irregular menstrual cycles, frequency of intercourse, weight, use of birth control pills in the year before conception, smoking, and alcohol and caffeine use.

The reasons for the chemical's effect on pregnancy isn't clear, Harley said.

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