I just saw this article on Yahoo! News and thought it was interesting in a sad kind of way.  It’s certainly informative for parents of teens and youth workers in our country.  It’s shocking to me to read that 7 out of every 100 teen girls get pregnant.  We need to be doing a better job informing and helping teens!  As a youth pastor, it’s sad to me that more families with pregnant teens don’t reach out to churches for help – is our reputation that terrifying?  Here’s the intro to the article, you can read the rest here:

Teen pregnancy rate up after 10-year decline

By JoAnne Allen Joanne Allen

The U.S. teen pregnancy rate rose in 2006 for the first time in more than a decade, reversing a long slide, a U.S. think tank reported on Tuesday.

The overall teen pregnancy rate was up 3 percent in 2006, with a 4 percent rise in the rate of births and a 1 percent rise in the rate of abortions, according to the report by the Guttmacher Institute.

The United States has higher rates of teen pregnancy, birth and abortion than in other Western industrialized countries.

There were 71 pregnancies per 1,000 U.S. girls aged 15-19. In 2006, 7 percent of all teenage girls got pregnant, according to the report.

One of the things that keeps coming to my mind are the studies I’ve read that show sexual activity is about the same for ‘church kids’ as the rest of the country; why is that?  Are we doing everything we can or does something need to change?