The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported in its 2003 Youth Risk Behavior Survey that almost half of high school students (46.7%) had had sexual intercourse, down from the 54% who were reported as sexually active in 1991. (See Table 7.1 and Figure 7.1.) Almost one in seven (14.2%) had had sex with four or more partners. Girls (45.3%) were slightly less likely than boys (48%) to…
In its 2003 Youth Risk Behavior Survey the CDC found that almost two-thirds of sexually active teenagers (63%) TABLE 7.2 reported that they or their partners used condoms during their last sexual intercourse, up from 46.2% in 1991, when the CDC began tracking condom use. (See Table 7.1.) Young African-Americans reported the highest condom use (72.8%) among sexually active youth, up from 48% i…
Adolescents and young adults have a higher risk of acquiring sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) than older adults. Female adolescents may have an increased susceptibility to chlamydia, a bacterial infection that can cause pelvic inflammatory disease and is a contributing factor in the transmission of HIV. In 2002 chlamydia was the most common sexually transmitted disease among adolescents. It wa…
The 2003 Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that 4.2% of students had been pregnant or had gotten someone pregnant. (See Table 7.1.) African-Americans (9.1%) were more likely than Hispanics (6.4%) or whites (2.3%) to have been pregnant or gotten someone pregnant. Pregnancy reports increased with grade level, with 2.6% of ninth graders and 6.2% of twelfth graders reporting having been pregnant or got…
Adolescent fathers were more likely than their childless peers to perform poorly in school, to drop out, to have few financial resources, and to have poor employment prospects. They were more likely than teen mothers to have more than one child and less likely to have an ongoing relationship with the mother of the first child. In 2002 fifteen- to nineteen-year-old males had a birth rate of 17.4 pe…
According to an article in Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, 1,313,300 legal induced abortions were performed in 2000, representing an 11% reduction in the abortion rate since 1994. About 18.6% of those legal abortions were performed on women under the age of twenty. (See Table 7.3.) Although the number of abortions for U.S. teens rose from 1975 to 1980, the number has decreased dram…
Just the Facts about Sexual Orientation and Youth, a pamphlet for school personnel put together by several organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, FIGURE 7.7 FIGURE 7.8 the American Psychological Association, and the National Education Association, stressed that sexual orientation is one aspect of the identity of adolescents—not a mental disorder. According to…
In response to the growing concern about out-of-wedlock births and the threat of AIDS, several national youth organizations and religious groups began campaigns in the early and mid-1990s to encourage teens to sign an abstinence pledge—a promise to abstain from sexual activity until marriage. In January 2001 researchers at Columbia and Yale universities released a study finding that by 1995…
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