Every 10 minutes, a teenager in Texas is getting pregnant, and with the nation’s third-highest teen birth rate, Texas stakeholders have announced a “teen pregnancy crisis.”
The announcement reflects a larger trend in the United States: This is the second year in a row that the national teen birth rate has increased.
The Girls Empowerment Network of Austin (GENaustin) is trying to combat the trend through education at its second annual Girls Now! Conference. Scheduled to be held at the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders on Nov. 14, the event partners with the Office of the Governor Criminal Justice Division to attack teen pregnancy from a new angle. The conference will focus on sex education and self-esteem-building workshops to spark girls’ interests outside of sex. There are workshops on how physics is secretly fun, self-awareness through yoga and writers’ workshops for aspiring wordsmiths.
The Richards school is an all-girls middle school named in honor of Texas’ late governor.
Another goal of the conference is to bring together parents and teens with questions for experts. There are interactive workshops scheduled on everyday challenges teens face in relation to sex, including dating, sexually transmitted diseases and parent-teen relationships.
GENaustin seeks to engage girls in dialogue about touchy issues like sex and how to navigate the waters of the teenage-sex drive. It also seeks to provide a safe place to ask pressing questions. There will be a series called “Straight Talk” to give girls a space to ask experts their toughest personal questions.
There will be workshops on how to combat the way the media portrays women, including a workshop called “Jessica Simpson is not fat.” The workshops aim to teach girls to view media with a critical eye.
Yet as the conference battles the media, it also buys into it. Former “Survivor” contestant Alexis Jones has been chosen as the keynote speaker over the hundreds of inspiring women working for sponsoring organizations, such as Austin Woman magazine and the City of Austin Commission for Women. Ms. Jones said the topic she will focus on is bullying, which she calls “an epidemic.”
GENaustin cites the following statistics:
• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that 70 percent of high school students report engaging in sex.
• Child Trends data show that 28 percent of Texas girls are expected to be teen mothers.
• The CDC says there are 10 new cases of HIV every year in Texas, and half are in people under the age of 25.
The conference will not be the final solution to teen pregnancy, but another chapter from the 750,000 teen pregnancies that occur annually in the United States.
One of the organizations on the front lines against teen pregnancy, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, has a program that looks at personal responsibility and moral values, among other things. “The Personal Responsibility, Religion and Public Values Program” of the National Campaign “seeks to catalyze a national discussion on the role of religion and values in teen and unplanned pregnancy prevention, to reach out to faith communities as partners in helping teens and young adults, and to reduce the polarizing conflict about preventing teen and unplanned pregnancy that too often impedes action in communities across the nation,” the organizations says on its Web site.
While sex-education policies and teen-pregnancy statistics vary from state to state, teaching girls about the risks involved with losing their virginity could help reverse the crisis.
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