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Price Tag of Teen Pregnancy

While many solutions are offered for the modern social epidemic of teen pregnancy, teaching abstinence until marriage is the one solution that most clearly and directly addresses the multiple effects of teen pregnancy. Teaching abstinence takes into account the physiology of the developing teenager, media messages, and data illustrating the significance of teenage sexual activity. 

One piece of evidence that drives communities to teach abstinence is the national price tag of teen pregnancy: $9.1 Billion (2006, National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy). That number personifies a fraction of the physical, social, emotional, mental, spiritual and financial costs associated with teenage sex. Teaching abstinence is not merely driven by an unpleasant price tag, but by the lives and futures it promises to positively affect.  As we commit to teach abstinence, more evidence of what can be prevented further fuels the progress.

Most of the costs associated with teen pregnancy are related to the negative consequences for the children of teen mothers, including costs for health care, foster care and incarceration.  In fact, research closely links teen parenthood to many negative consequences for mothers, fathers, and their children.  For example, compared to those who delay childbearing, teen mothers are more likely to drop out of school, remain unmarried, and live in poverty; their children are more likely to be born at low birth weight, grow up poor, live in single-parent households, experience abuse and neglect, and enter the child welfare system.  Daughters of teen mothers are more likely to become teen parents themselves and sons of teen mothers are more likely to be incarcerated (Hoffman, SD 2006, By the Numbers: The Public Sector Costs of Teen Childbearing.  The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy: Washington, DC.).

As a quick snap shot in Arizona alone, the cost to Arizona taxpayers (federal, state and local) was at least $252 million in 2004. In Arizona, the average annual cost associated with a child born to a mother 17 and younger is $3,364 compared to the average cost of a child born to a mother 17 and older is $1,408.  According to the Arizona Department of Health Services, in 2006, the State of Arizona paid for 79.9% of the births among females 19 and younger.

Teaching abstinence is the only answer that passes the test of experience and results – if a teenager waits until marriage, the risk for unnecessary social, physical, mental, financial, spiritual or emotional complications significantly decreases. In a broader sense, teaching abstinence reaches deep into a social, economic and cultural context that healthy, growing communities demand.

To learn more about the cost and implications of teen pregnancy where you live, visit your state's department of health website and search for vital statistics.  Each state's vital statistics personify the demographics including age, race, ethnicity, location, outcome, source of payment for labor and delivery, prevalence of STDs, birth rates by age groups, even tobacco and alcohol influence during pregnancy.