Opening Statement of the Hon. Benjamin Cardin, a Representative in Congress from the State of Maryland

Hearing on Teen Pregnancy Prevention

November 15, 2001

Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to be here today to discuss our Nation’s effort to reduce teenage pregnancy – a goal for which there is broad bipartisan support.

Reducing teen births is not a panacea for every social problem, but it will help promote better outcomes for families. In short, convincing young people to delay pregnancy will put them in a much better position to provide and care for their children.

Fortunately, progress is being made on this important issue. Both teen pregnancy and teen birth rates have been falling since 1991--with the teen birth rate hitting a record low last year. However, even with this improvement, the United States still has the highest teenage birth rate among developed countries.

The question before this panel is how do we maintain the current progress on reducing teen pregnancy. To answer that inquiry, we first need to develop a consensus on what policy and societal changes prompted the improvement in teen pregnancy rates that have occurred over the last ten years.

As is so often the case, there is no single answer. Rather, there are mix of causes, some of which are linked to changes in public policy and some of which have nothing to do with any particular action taken by the government.

First, a rising fear of sexually-transmitted diseases over the last decade decreased sexual activity and/or unprotected sex among teenagers.

Second, increased access to contraception and more effective forms of long-term contraception, such as Depo-Provera, reduced the number of unintended pregnancies.

Third, local efforts to reduce teenage births, through counseling or other methods, may have produced some positive results.

Forth, while I have not seen any corroborative evidence for this presumption, I would guess that a decade of strong economic growth had a positive impact on reducing teenage pregnancies to the extent it reduced the sense of hopelessness and hardship that sometimes leads to unwise decisions.

And finally, a more general change may have occurred in young people’s attitude towards sex. Many factors may have contributed to this last change, including government policies that stress personal responsibility, such as the provisions on promoting work and on enforcing child support obligations in the 1996 welfare law.

However, there is no evidence that any of the provisions in the 1996 welfare law that specifically targeted reducing teen and non-marital births have had any discernable impact.

In terms of what this means for the future, I would say that we should continue our focus on personal responsibility; we should do a better job of not only funding local efforts to combat teen pregnancy, but also of highlighting successful programs; we should increase access to youth development and after-school programs that give teenagers productive activities to pursue; and we should promote the value of abstinence without undercutting our commitment to providing access to and information about contraception.

On this last issue, I think it is important to remember that discussing contraception has never been found to promote sexual activity among teenagers, but there is evidence that such discussions reduce unintended pregnancies. This means that we can tell teens that abstinence is always the best option, but if they do have sex, they should take precautions against pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases.

I look forward to hearing from our witnesses about their views on how best to continue our progress on reducing teen births. Thank you.