Educação pode mudar sua vida

According to When Teens Have Sex, a report released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, roughly 40 percent of American girls in their teen years become pregnant before age 20. Moreover, the one million pregnancies that occur each year among women ages 15 to 19 result in 500,000 teen births – a serious economic and social challenge for the United States.
'This country has the highest teen birth rate among developed nations,’ said the Foundation Coordinator William O’Hare. ‘The next closest, the United Kingdom, has a teen birth rate that is only about half that of America. The problem of teen births is evident in every State. In fact, every U.S. State has a birth rate that is higher than that of the United Kingdom.’
The report notes that despite recent downward trends, the teen birth rate in 1996 is still higher than it was a decade earlier, and that demographic trends suggest that the number of births to teens is likely to increase by as much as 14 percent by the year 2005.
‘As the children of the “little baby boom” swell the ranks of American teenagers over the next few years, the absolute number of babies born to teenagers is likely to increase even if the birth rate remains constant’, said O’Hare. And this implies more government attention to this section of the American population in social terms.
The report states that more than 75 percent of all unmarried teen mothers went on welfare within five years of the birth of their first child before getting back to some kind of job. In addition, the report notes that in 1996, the poverty rate for children born to teens was 42 percent, twice the overall rate for children.
‘We cannot afford to take the issue of teen pregnancy lightly. Children born to teenage parents are more likely to be of low birth rate, to suffer with inadequate health care, to leave high school without graduating and more likely to be poor, thus perpetuating a cycle of unrealized potential’, added Annie E. Casey, the Foundation Program Director.