Teenage pregnancy in the US

The BBC News site is carrying a report on the teenage pregnancy rate in the United States, in the light of Bristol Palin's pregnancy. Extracts from the BBC report, which can be found here:

According to America's leading health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): "About one-third of girls in the United States get pregnant before age 20."

More than 80% of births in this group "were unintended, meaning they occurred sooner than desired or were not wanted at any time", the CDC said.

Separately, in a report on 2002 data, the CDC said: "Despite the continuous declines, the US teenage pregnancy rate is still among the highest among industrialised nations. The costs of teenage childbearing in the United States are substantial.

"The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy recently estimated that $9.1bn in public funding was expended on teenage childbearing in 2004. These costs include public assistance, healthcare, child welfare and other expenses."

Whether the figures being cited here are statistically robust, I have no idea. I suspect that those with a specialist interest in these figures will first of all want to go an look at the statistics to check them out.

But there are some interesting agendas revealed in the extracts.

1. Why should the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention be taking an interest in pregnancy, which, after all, is not a disease?

2. Why is teenage pregancy seen as a bad thing? Ah, the financial cost ... But do we really want to measure the value of people just financially?

3. There is a number sitting between the "one third of girls who become pregnant before age 20" and the "80% of births in this age group that are unintended" .... and that is the number of abortions experienced by girls in this age group. Whew, that missing number looks to be huge ... (but see my comment above about the statistics).

As an aside, these three points could all be examined from the point of view of the relationship between state and civil society. The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, can be clearly seen as a way in which the state meets its duty to assure the common good of civil society by coordinating activity to control disease. But does it overstep its correct relation to the common good of civil society by undertaking activity that relates to a condition that is not a disease at all?

Here in the UK exactly parallel considerations can be applied to the governments Teenage Pregnancy Strategy.