I’ve been reading this article today that addresses the teen pregnancy issue and offers a solution: Give disadvantaged young girls options and purpose.
For all the noise and clatter about encouraging abstinence or handing out condoms in schools, many close to the issue are convinced that teenage pregnancy is less a matter of morals or sex education or access to birth control than it is a matter of a girl — or boy — feeling that they have a future. Or not.
“Simply put, girls with prospects do not have babies. It is not just the disadvantaged, but the ‘discouraged among the disadvantaged’ who become teen mothers,” Janet Rich-Edwards, a Harvard epidemiologist, wrote in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
Some even theorize that many teenage girls don’t have babies despite being poor. They have babies because they are poor. Teen pregnancy is well established as a cause of poverty. It may also be a result of poverty.
Lisa Piscopo, a Colorado Children’s Campaign researcher, said she suspects many teen pregnancies among disadvantaged kids aren’t accidents.
“I believe girls choose to have babies when they don’t have a vision of any other options,” she said.
That’s something we should all agree on. While I don’t adhere completely to some of the articles’ finer points, it seems, at least in Colorado, people are finally addressing the why behind teenage pregnancy instead of focusing solely on the how. It continues,
In 2009, a University of Chicago study reported that by age 17, one-third of young women in foster care reported having been pregnant. By age 19, that proportion had risen to nearly half. The study’s author, Amy Dworsky, found that as many as one third of girls interviewed for the study said they wanted to become pregnant. It’s likely, Dworsky told a congressional panel in 2009, that those girls want “to create the family they don’t have or fill an emotional void.”[…]
“And they’ll ask, ‘Why wait? Wait for what? I’m not going to college.’ “
by 
Interesting studies out there on adolescents and their ‘accomplishments’. The one on overachieving adolescents was most revealing as it was discovered they were living up to their parent’s expectations. In other words they were not ‘overachieving’. Similarly, adolescents have babies to meet expectations and are sexually active to meet expectations. Such research should prompt revisions for social policy, parental involvement and most importantly school ‘sex ed’ programs which presently ‘expect’ adolescents to be sexually active. Research shows the vast majority of adolescents would prefer to not be sexually active and it is expectations like that promoted by the school system that is making life so unhealthy for youth.
I think the issues surrounding teen sexual activity and pregnancy are as varied as the teens themselves. Finding solutions, too, will be much more complex than merely offering a “sense of purpose”. In the case of children in foster care, many of them are most likely seeking love and affirmation in sex. A “sense of purpose”, frankly, can only come after a person believes in her own inherent value.