First Article Review

The subject I am interested in researching is, teen pregnancy in the United States. The reason why I want to focus on the United States is because the United States has a higher rate of teen pregnancy compared to other developed countries. For my first article review I found an article on Google Scholar, and it is titled, Readings on Teenagers and Sex Education. This article was written by the Alan Guttmacher Institute of New York and Washington, which is a non-profit organization that holds programs reproductive health. There are many authors that dedicated their research to this article. This article gives information teen pregnancy in the United States, and talks about the sex education that is given at most schools. The teen pregnancy rate in the United States has declined since 1990, which was the year that had the most teen pregnancies. The reason for this seems to be contraceptives, protection, and sex education. Although the numbers keep decreasing, the schools can do a lot more to help prevent teen pregnancies. In sex education classes abstinence is the main topic, not contraceptives and how to use protection, and just teaching abstinence is obviously not realistic, because the ages of teens having sex keeps getting younger by the years. There are also many other factors that lead to teen pregnancy, but this article focused on changing what is taught in sexual education classes.

The authors are basically saying that the number of teen pregnancies are can keep decreasing by reforming sexual education classes. The important thing is education, not teaching abstinence because most likely they will stray away from that view and when they get in a sexual situation the education a teen needs is not there. The position of the authors is, educate and inform teens on contraceptives and how to protect they, as well as learning about the risks of sex. The key terms that are frequently mentioned are, contraceptives and abstinence. The issues that the author addressed is the lack of education on protection in sexual education classes, and the lack of parental and teacher guidance. The authors use some great graphs and statistics that describe how many teens are becoming sexually active and pregnant. The statistics stood out the most to me. It was surprising to see all the statistics. The authors also compared the United States to other developed countries, and came up with reasons why U.S teens are more likely to become pregnant during their teenage years. This article was very helpful with my research, and gave some great, valid information that I can examine further and add to my conclusions.

Cited Source:

The Alan Guttmacher Institute. Readings on Teenagers and Sex Education. New York, New York, 2004.