Reported teen births and sexual activity has decreased every year since 1991, although the decline has slowed and the rate actually increased among teens under 15.
The family advocacy group Concerned Women for America says it's pleased with the overall trend but points to cause for concern.
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The good news is more than half of high-school-aged teens say they abstain from sex, the group notes. But there are more repeat teen births and nearly half of the sexually transmitted diseases, or STDs, occur among people aged 15-24.
Janice Shaw Crouse, senior fellow of the Beverly LaHaye Institute, CWA's think tank, warns parents that more than half of the new STDs among teens are the dangerous human papillomavirus, or HPV, which causes 90 percent of the cases of cervical cancer and kills more than 5,000 women every year.
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The latest data – analyzed in Beverly LaHaye Institute's Data Digest and in an April report by Child Trends – is from the National Center for Health Statistics for 2004.
The Child Trend analysis notes teen birth rates have declined by nearly a third since 1991, from 61.8 per 1,000 females ages 15 to 19 to 41.2 per 1,000 in 2004, the lowest rate ever reported in the United States.
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"Clearly, there is much to celebrate about the changing trends regarding teen sexual behavior, but, at the same time, there remains much cause for concern among those who care about teenage well-being," Crouse said.
She finds encouragement in the fact that half of the female teens, 53 percent, and 41 percent of the male teens talked with their parents or guardian about how to say no to sex.
"These numbers indicate that parents increasingly are involved in guiding their teens through the dangerous teenage years," she said.
The data, Crouse continued, "reinforce the importance of parental involvement and parental faith – parents with consistent faith and high-quality mother-teen relationship provide protection against teen sexual activity and its accompanying disastrous outcomes."
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