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Originally Posted by rainheart
I don't know, I'd have to say I haven't heard of many teenage pregnancies. To say that "It's not as uncommon as you think" is true, but in the same respect it's not as common as it's being blown out of proportion to be.
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i suppose that depends on what you mean by "blown out of proportion." that every teen is having sex? i know that isn't true. that the majority of teens are? well, you'd have to redefine teen, 13-19 is "teen" but i don't think there as many 13 year olds having sex as there are 19 year olds.
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Pregnant teens are a minority, and some are truely bad apples. My previous school had a student body of 1700 and I never heard of a teenage pregnancy, and on top of that my new school also has a student body of roughly 1700 and so far no such stories, still. Of course that begs the question "are you in the know?", and at least for my previous school I most definately was.
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teen pregnancy is a horse of a different color. you must be having sex to get pregnant, but having sex doesn't mean that you
will get pregnant. birth control is readily available regardless of age.
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Citing planned parenthood is a bad example imo, that's like saying "adults are chronic alcoholics, I went to an AA meeting and you'd be surprised how many adults there were chronic alcoholics." Sober individuals without drinking problems just don't go to AA meetings.
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well, since i was in college at the time, that was pretty much my only involvement with any teens. and planned parenthood is often associated with the younger population but it offers services to women and men of any age. you don't have to be sexually active to use their services, not all of the clients i saw were. do you go to the dentist for check-ups or only when you have a toothache?
and i wasn't saying that
all teenagers are having sex, but that it is definetly happening. and when i talked with a few dozen girls (under age 16) in my average sized community who were not only sexually active but had a significant number of partners, it left an impression.
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Now I don't know what kind of doubts you had about sex between teenagers. In fact you just mentioned you had doubts about teenage sex-- but didn't say what those doubts were. That it occurred? Or that it was as frequent as sex between adults?
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actually, i said that any doubts i
may have had, which doesn't mean there were any. i was well aware it was happening and that it wasn't at all uncommon. as frequent as sex between adults? no. as infrequent as sex between 8 year old children? no. this was a hot topic even when i was a teen and i remember writing several school papers on the subject of sexual activity and education among teens for various health and english courses. keep in mind that at the time, we were relying on stats even older than the '95 ones i presented here, but there was still the question of if the media was blowing it out of proportion (and if sex ed was contributing to increased sexual activity).
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In my previous post I think I conveyed the wrong idea that teenage sex doesn't occur at 13, or give or take a couple of years. It does, but for a small minority.
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this is the latest info i could find on the subject
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/04news/teens.htm
they don't discuss sexual activity for those under the age of 15. but as of 2002, 30% of girls 15-17 are sexually active (which was down from 38% in 1995), compared to 31% of boys (down from 43% in '95). the numbers increase for teens 18-19 with girls at 69% (up from 68% in 1995) and boys at 64% (down from 75% in '95).
so a little more than twice as many teens are sexually active at 18-19 compared to 15-19. i may be a little older than you but the '95 stats are a better reflection of what it was like when i was in school.
to state numbers for teens below 15 would be a guess, unless you have more time than i do and wanna find some stats
at any rate, 15 is still pretty young and 3 out of 10 isn't what i personally would consider a small minority.
also, as i recall from my own teen years, oral wasn't
really sex (and neither was anal for that matter). the older i got though, the more likely such behavior was accepted as sexual activity. afaik, no official data exists on any activity other than vaginal intercourse. depending on how a person chooses to view "sexual activity" the stats offered by the nchs could be way off.
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Of course this is all relevant to my experience- I think it does have a lot to do with socio-economic status. My peers in high school are from families who are either right above the poverty line (30/40k a year families) to families with better incomes (say 90k a year families, that's a hard thing to point out because you can't go up to them and ask them what their incomes are haha). I would hypothesize it would be worse in the bad neighbourhoods.
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my community has a similar status but with a wider range. i went to school with plenty of kids that lived at or below the poverty line (under 20k) as well as those who were from families easily earning 10 times as much. the majority of us fell somewhere in between. right around the 60-80k mark if i were to guess (based off my own family's income level at the time).
*edit* found this link
http://www.agi-usa.org/pubs/journals/3229800.html that deals with the subject of oral sex among teens. apparently, there is no accurate statistical data.