[Sandra Teen Model Pregnant
Tilo Chopin
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Objective: There is increasing evidence that youth exposure to sexual content on television shapes sexual attitudes and behavior in a manner that may influence reproductive health outcomes. To our knowledge, no previous work has empirically examined associations between exposure to television sexual content and adolescent pregnancy.
Methods: Data from a national longitudinal survey of teens (12-17 years of age, monitored to 15-20 years of age) were used to assess whether exposure to televised sexual content predicted subsequent pregnancy for girls or responsibility for pregnancy for boys. Multivariate logistic regression models controlled for other known correlates of exposure to sexual content and pregnancy. We measured experience of a teen pregnancy during a 3-year period.
Results: Exposure to sexual content on television predicted teen pregnancy, with adjustment for all covariates. Teens who were exposed to high levels of television sexual content (90th percentile) were twice as likely to experience a pregnancy in the subsequent 3 years, compared with those with lower levels of exposure (10th percentile).
Conclusions: This is the first study to demonstrate a prospective link between exposure to sexual content on television and the experience of a pregnancy before the age of 20. Limiting adolescent exposure to the sexual content on television and balancing portrayals of sex in the media with information about possible negative consequences might reduce the risk of teen pregnancy. Parents may be able to mitigate the influence of this sexual content by viewing with their children and discussing these depictions of sex.
When a minor becomes pregnant, is it a school's responsibility to notify the parents? Sandra Kopels, a lawyer and social worker who is a professor of social work at Illinois and expert in legal and ethical issues affecting social work clients and practitioners, discusses the implications of teen pregnancy notification policies with News Bureau reporter Phil Ciciora.
Just because a student happens to be a minor who attends school in a particular district and then becomes pregnant doesn't establish a duty for the school to notify the parents of her pregnancy. School districts should not overreact when their personnel learn that a minor student is pregnant, nor should they mistakenly believe that they have a duty to notify the parents about student pregnancies.
Problems can arise from the creation of pregnancy notification policies. Although school districts may think their potential liability is minimized by establishing mandatory notification policies, these rules may have the opposite effect. Notification policies may actually open the schools up to increased liability for violations of students' constitutional rights to privacy, their rights to confidentiality, gender discrimination, and other claims.
Even in the unlikely event that a school district employee "caused" a student to become pregnant - for example, the school negligently hired a sexual predator who then impregnated the minor - the school would not have a duty to notify the parents of the pregnancy, especially if the minor objected to the disclosure. The district certainly might be liable for its hiring or supervision practices, but not for its failure to tell the parents of the pregnancy.
In the more likely situation where a student becomes pregnant by her boyfriend, it's hard to see how there would be any liability on the part of the school for failing to notify the parents of the pregnancy.
In the law, there's a concept known as the "duty to warn," which arises in a number of different situations where one person is viewed as having the duty to prevent harm from befalling another person.
In therapeutic relationships, the "duty to warn" encompasses dangerous situations that involve physical harm or imminent danger that individuals may inflict upon themselves or another. Typically, at the first session when a social worker, psychologist, psychiatrist or other helping professional meets the client, the professional will say, "If you ever tell me that you're being abused" - if the client is a minor - "or if you ever tell me that you are abusing a child or that you are going to hurt yourself or others, then I have to disclose that information."
In a nutshell, if the client ever says something that the therapist believes is indicative of the client's causing a clear, imminent risk of danger to the client or third party, the therapist has the duty to warn or protect the third party.
The "duty to warn" is generally misunderstood by mental health practitioners who are subject to it. Clearly, when a minor is pregnant and is at risk of suffering adverse health affects because of her pregnancy, her parents should be told of the pregnancy. In those cases where the minor's health is compromised, her pregnancy could constitute a danger to her physical well being; telling her parents would be consistent with a duty to warn.
Unlike in other states, the Illinois Supreme Court has a very narrow interpretation of the duty to warn and to whom any duty is owed. So it is really hard to see how schools would believe they have the responsibility to notify parents of pregnancy. Absent a threat to a minor's health, schools do not have the responsibility to inform parents of pregnancy, or if the student is HIV-positive.
Let's say the policy dictates that all school staff must notify a student's parents within 10 days of staff learning that a student is pregnant. Hypothetically speaking, if the lunchroom attendant overhears a student tell her friend that she is pregnant, the lunchroom attendant would have to disclose that information to the parents.
So, under the school's policy, even though the school employs personnel like school social workers who have education and training in conflict resolution and who can provide counseling and interventions to students and their parents, the delicate task of telling the parents of their child's pregnancy may fall to the lunchroom attendant, who probably does not possess skills in this area.
Additionally, implementing a district policy that requires parental notification of pregnancy could impose liability on a district merely because of the consequences of non-compliance with the policy, rather than because of any duty to notify that exists under the law.
In this chapter some basic demographic description of the number and rates of teen pregnancies, births and abortions are first presented for the United States. Comparisons are drawn with Denmark, a country with registers of health events. Statistics showing the actual way pregnancies to U.S. teens are resolved are presented, followed by a discussion of research that sheds light on the factors associated with resolving a pregnancy one way rather than another. A summary and conclusions section closes the chapter.
In 1984 there were 469,682 births to teenagers 15 to 19, 9,965 births to teens under 15. This represents a considerable decline in births to teens over the decade, from a high of 656,000 in 1970. The number of pregnancies rose slightly until 1980 and has declined slightly since then. There were over a million pregnancies to teens in 1984 (Table 3.1).
However, the change in the absolute numbers of births and pregnancies does not adequately indicate the incidence of teen pregnancy and childbearing because it does not take into account changes in the number of teen women. The number of teens rose during the 1970s, leveling off in the mid 1970s and declining since 1979. Nor does it take into consideration the number of women at risk, that is, the number of women who are sexually active (see Hofferth et al., 1986). This is especially important for teenagers, only a portion of whom are sexually active. Pregnancy rates1 per 1000 women 15 to 19 rose 9 per- cent between 1974 and 1984; however, because the proportion who were sexually active also rose over the period, the pregnancy rates per 1000 sexually active women 15 to 19 actually fell 8.7 percent between 1974 and 1984.
What does this mean for individual women? The pregnancy rate in 1984 was 231 per 1000 sexually active women. This means that in 1984, 23 percent of sexually active teenagers would have become pregnant. This figure, however, only indicates the proportion of teens who would become pregnant in any one year. A more interesting figure is the proportion of young women who would ever become pregnant before reaching age 20. That is, what is the chance that a young woman would become pregnant as a teenager? Although this probability has been estimated using survey data, since abortions are underestimated in such data, the estimates of pregnancy will be low. Better estimates are obtained from reporting data such as those collected by the Centers for Disease Control and the Alan Guttmacher Institute. Based on such data it was estimated that in 1981 about 44 percent of young women will become pregnant before reaching age 20, 40 percent of white and 63 percent of black women (Forrest, 1986; Table 3.3).
What happens to these one million teenage pregnancies? Many more young women under 20 become pregnant than bear a child, almost twice as many. In 1982 the total births to teenagers 15 to 19 represented 47 percent of the total number of pregnancies (abortions plus births plus miscarriages [Table 3.1]).
Table 3.2 shows how pregnancies in 1982 were divided: 40 percent of the pregnancies were aborted, and 13 percent miscarried; thus slightly under half, 47 percent, resulted in a live birth. The 47 percent which were live births are divided as follows: 13 percent were postmaritally conceived births, 11 percent were premaritally conceived but born postmaritally, and 23 percent were born out-of-wedlock (estimates from Table 3.1 and O'Connell and Rogers, 1984).
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