The teen pregnancy rate among New York City’s public high school students dropped 27% over a decade, new city data shows. Among 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19, 73 became pregnant in 2010. That’s down from 99 of 1,000 girls who became pregnant in 2001.
“We’re seeing that there are two things happening: teens are both delaying sex, and those that are having sex are more likely to use contraceptives,” Deborah Kaplan, assistant commissioner of the New York City Department of Health’s Bureau of Maternal, Infant and Reproductive Health, told MSNBC.com. “Our efforts to make sex education and birth control more widely available in public high schools are working.”
According to the health department’s numbers, she’s right. From 2001 to 2011, there was a 12-point drop in the proportion of public high school students who have ever had sex: 51% to 39%. And from just 2009 to 2011, the proportion of sexually active female students who used hormonal contraception (Plan B included) or long-acting reversible contraception (such as an IUD) the last time they had intercourse increased from 17 to nearly 27%. Read full article.
