Does location play a role in whether or not your teenager will make you a grandparent long before you’re ready?
According to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), you may consider moving to the following states if you don’t want your baby giving birth to a baby while she is still in her teens: New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. According to the CDC, those states have the lowest rates of teenage pregnancy in the entire country.
The states with the highest rate of pregnant teenagers include Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, New Mexico and Mississippi. If you don’t want your daughter ending up like Jamie Lynn Spears stay far, far away from Mississippi. According to the CDC, the Magnolia State logs 55 births for every 1,000 teenaged girls. Compare that with New Hampshire, which has the lowest rate in the country at 15.7 births for every 1,000 teenaged girls.
Government rresearchers had some good news to report in its new study: Overall the teen birth rate in the United States is now 37 percent lower than it was in 1957. The CDC attributes the decline to “better sex education and more widespread contraceptive use.”
If that statistic doesn’t do anything for you, consider that the new numbers reflect an-all time low in teen pregnancies, dropping 9 percent from 2009 to 2010. Never mind that the number of teenage pregnancies in the United States is still double that of 20 other industrialized nations. According to the CDC, there were 34.4 births per 1,000 U.S. females ages 15 to 19 in 2010.
To put that into perspective, according to the CDC’s latest study, a teenage girl who grows up in the United States is nine times as likely to give birth as one who is raised in Switzerland and twice as likely as someone who grows up in any of the 19 other industrialized countries.
So, if you have a house full of teenagers and were contemplating a move abroad, Switzerland may be looking pretty darn good right about now.
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