Clinton Airs Plan to Curb Teen Births

ST. THOMAS, U.S. Virgin Islands — President Clinton on Saturday announced a new national strategy to reduce teen pregnancies through federal programs built around the unifying theme of encouraging adolescents to abstain from sex.

At the same time, the president cited new figures pointing to a drop of more than 10% in teenage birth rates in 10 states and took some credit for the reduction.

“In just four years . . . we have replaced political rhetoric with a strategy of giving people the tools to solve their problems and demanding responsibility from all of our citizens,” Clinton said in his weekly radio address, which he recorded while on vacation here.

The president added that the good news about teen pregnancy should give the country new hope that other seemingly intractable social problems can be successfully addressed.

“The progress we’re making on teen pregnancy shows that we can overcome even our most stubborn and serious problems because of the energy and the effort of the American people,” Clinton said.

The president stressed that the teen birth rate is still “intolerably high” in America. Each year, 200,000 girls younger than 18 have children, many from unwanted pregnancies.

The president has long used his bully pulpit to urge teenagers not to have babies, and his administration has put in place new programs to fight the problem. But the programs featured a variety of themes and methods and were not consistent in advocating abstinence as the central message.

Clinton’s strategy fulfills a stipulation in the welfare reform legislation passed by Congress last year that requires the federal government to come up with a new plan to reduce teen births by the first of this year. The new plan includes:

* Providing $7.5 million for pioneering local programs that teach young people to postpone sex;

* Studying existing programs to determine which are most effective, and then spreading the news about the best programs nationwide;

* Executing provisions of the welfare law that require teen mothers to stay in school and live at home in order to receive federal assistance;

* Improving the research tools available to track teen pregnancy trends.

Although significant declines in teen birth rates have been charted, the reductions vary greatly from state to state. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which last month released state-by-state data on birth rates for teenagers in 1994, does not yet know why the rates are declining or why they vary so sharply among states.

In California, the birth rate from 1991 to 1994 for girls ages 15 to 19 declined 4.5%, although the national average reduction was much higher, at 8%. Some states, including New York, Nevada, New Mexico and Louisiana, reported no significant change. Officials said one reason the birth rate in California did not decline as rapidly was the state’s higher proportion of Latinos.

Births to Latino teens nationwide increased 1% from 1991 to 1994. Births to black teenagers, by contrast, declined 10% during the same period and births to non-Latino white teenagers declined 7%.

“The high level of the California rate is due to the composition of the population,” said Stephanie Ventura, a statistician for the CDC.

Ventura said federal officials expect to learn more about why births are declining in a few months, when the national survey of family growth is released with 1995 data.

Birth rates for teenagers peaked in 1991 and have been declining since. However, the rates reported by states for 1994 were still higher or as high as they were two decades earlier.