percent among white teenagers in the same time period. Among Hispanic teenagers, who may be of any race, the pregnancy rate increased slightly from 1991 to 1992 but by 2002 was 19 percent lower than the 1990 rate.
Generally, states with the largest numbers of teenagers tend to have the greatest number of teenage pregnancies. The Guttmacher Institute (2006) identified the following states as having the highest number of adolescent pregnancies: California, Texas, New York, Florida, and Illinois. The smallest numbers of teenage pregnancies occurred in Vermont, North Dakota, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Alaska each of which reported fewer than 2,000 pregnancies among those between the ages of 15 and 19.
These data are promising and do tend to suggest that there is reason to believe that teen pregnancies are declining. Nevertheless, health care professionals, educators, and social workers make note of the fact that 700,000 to 800,000 births to adolescents each year is a highly undesirable phenomenon. Naomi Bar-Yam (2000) pointed out that teenagers have been having babies since the beginning of time and this is still a norm in much of the world. In the United States, teenage motherhood has been identified as an epidemic and a problem worthy of debate, research, and policy initiatives. In the United States, Bar-Yam (2000) noted that teenage childbearing disproportionately affects poor, black, and rural girls than their middle class urban counterparts because, in part, middle class teens who become pregnant are more likely to terminate their pregnancies. Because this is the case, Bar-Yam (2000) suggests that it is difficult to know the actual extent of teen pregnancies in the U.S. or to determine whether or not there is any meaningful correlation between such variables as race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status and the decision to continue or terminate a pregnancy.
Van Lenten (2007) stated that close to 2,800 American ...