National Day to Prevent Teen Pregnancy observed in Aroostook County

   PRESQUE ISLE, Maine – ACAP Health Services, along with Cary Library in Houlton, Mark and Emily Turner Memorial Library in Presque Isle and the Caribou Public Library, are working together in an effort to support National Teen Pregnancy Awareness. May is designated as Teen Pregnancy Prevention Month, and community efforts to raise awareness about teen pregnancy and the need for effective, comprehensive teen pregnancy prevention programs are taking place.     Hundreds of thousands of teens nationwide are expected to participate in the seventh annual National Day to Prevent Teen Pregnancy May 6. The purpose of the National Day is to focus the attention of teens on the importance of avoiding too-early pregnancy and parenthood through an interactive online quiz.
On the National Day, teens nationwide are asked to go to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy’s new teen Web site – www.StayTeen.org – and take a short, scenario-based quiz (available in English and Spanish). The quiz challenges young people to consider what they would do in a number of sexual situations. In addition to the National Day Quiz, the National Campaign is also offering an online application that allows teens to add the National Day Quiz to their profiles on Web sites like MySpace and Facebook and an online video contest for teens at www.StayTeen.org.
The message of the National Day is straightforward: Sex has consequences. The online quiz delivers this message directly to teens and challenges them to think carefully about what they might do “in the moment.” Since the early 1990s, the teen pregnancy rate has declined 38 percent and the teen birth rate has declined 32 percent. In fact, few social problems have improved quite as dramatically over the past 10 years. The most recent news on this front, however, has not been positive. According to data released in March 2009 by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), the U.S. teen birth rate increased for the second year in a row since 2005. These increases follow 14 years of continuous decline in the teen birth rate. That is, after declining 34 percent between 1991 and 2005, the teen birth rate has now increased 5 percent between 2005 and 2007.
According to 2006 statistics from www.teenpregnancy.org, the public cost of childbearing in Maine is staggering. Teen childbearing in 2004 cost Maine taxpayers at least $16 million – 30 percent of the costs being federally funded, and 70 percent of the costs came from state and local funding.
The 2002-2006 teen pregnancy rate in Maine – according to the Maine Department of Health and Human Services – was 41.9 percent for 15-19 year olds. Aroostook County’s rate was 32.4 percent. Among the towns in the county, those with the highest percentage of teen pregnancies (based on population) are: Ashland (64.8 percent), Westfield (61.9 percent), Houlton (58.2 percent), Washburn (43.9 percent), Fort Fairfield (40.3 percent), Caribou (40.1 percent), Mars Hill (39.3 percent) and Presque Isle (38.4 percent).
During the month of May, each local library will have Internet access to the Stayteen.org Web site so that teens may take the quiz, and information will be available to raise awareness about teen pregnancy and its affects.
For more information about how parents, teachers, and other community members can help prevent teen pregnancy, please contact Wendy Page or Lisa Rubin at ACAP Health Services, 768-3056. Information is also available on ACAP’s MySpace page at www.MySpace.com/healthservices.