Combating Teen Pregnancy

Mississippi leads the country in teen pregnancies, and debates continue on whether sex education should be taught in all school districts. MPB’s Phoebe Judge reports on what one group of teenagers on the Coast are doing to help lower the teen pregnancy rate.

Late last month a small but enthusiastic crowd of parents and teenagers came together at a theater in Ocean Springs for the teens teaching teens, Triple Threat Jump Off. The program which included church choirs, motivational speeches, and discussions by medical professionals, was an attempt to speak openly about the growing problem of teen pregnancy in the state. Deetra Lewis is a senior at Ocean Springs High School,

“Cause there’s girls that are younger than me in my family that are pregnant, and it kills me to see them have to go through this stuff, and there’s girls in my school that are pregnant, and it just, and a lot of adults don’t want to talk about it and we know it’s an issue, but no one wants to bring it up, so.”

So, Lewis along with other members of the Ocean Springs Mayors Youth Council, which works to advise the local government on community issues, decided to try and begin to tackle the issue. Mississippi leads the nation in teen pregnancies and has held that title for a number of years. In 2007 the teen pregnancy rate was 71.8 per 1000 births, up five percent from the previous year. Ron Cossman, research director for Mississippi Kids Count, says the real problem is that no one really knows why teens are getting pregnant,

“The problem that we have is that you can’t ask a 16 year old why they got pregnant or why they had sex, and expect to receive a thoughtful answer from them. So we have this paradox of not being able to go to the people who are engaging in this behavior and asking them why they are engaging in that behavior.”

Mark Regnerus, professor of sociology at the University of Texas and author of “Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers, says to find an answer to why Mississippi has such a high teen pregnancy rate, one may only need to look at the environment in which the teens are growing up,

“So you have a long term legacy of poverty, and a modest educational system, and not a great record probably in sex education. A lot of it has to do with economic opportunity as well. If a young woman of 14, 15, or 16, doesn’t hold out hope for a life at 20 or 25 then what happens next is usually not that surprising.”

Schools in Mississippi are required to teach reproductive health, but not sex education. If a school does decide to teach sex education, it must be an abstinence based curriculum as mandated by the state legislature. The state’s Office of Healthy Schools does not have an accurate number of how many schools even attempt to breach the subject. This all came as a shock for Ocean Springs highschooler, April Love who grew up in the Northern states were sex education is much more prevalent,

“I’m not saying that parents shouldn’t take the time to talk to their kids, but what about the kids whose parents are not talking to them. They need it in the schools because there are some kids who won’t eat unless they eat at school, so there are some kids who won’t learn about this unless they do it at school.”

April is sitting in the board room of Ocean Springs city hall surrounded by other members of the Mayor’s Youth Council, a couple of weeks before the Triple Threat Jumpoff program. The consensus around the table is that there just isn’t enough open dialogue about consequences of sex, in an increasing sexualized culture. Chris McCullum is a youth director at the Bible Study Baptist Church,

“We can’t take from a person his choice, and so we should put the information out there. Abstinence, safe sex, but the child has to make his own decisions, we can’t make them make decisions.”

And the whole purpose of the youth council is to hear what issues are really affecting the younger population says Ocean Springs Mayor Connie Moran,

“I’ve been listening a lot to what these youths have to say. I think it’s time to listen up Mississippi to what these youths are trying to tell us, they want to know, they want the facts. I think it’s up to us and our responsibility to give it to them.”

Along with holding events like the Triple Threat Jump-Off, members of the youth council are also mentoring girls at the Ocean Springs Middle School. The state has seen hundreds of girls under 14 give birth in the past few years. For MPB News, I’m Phoebe Judge.