BY LAURA MECKLER
The Associated Press and The Cincinnati Enquirer
WASHINGTON -- American teen-agers are having fewer babies, including a dramatic decrease among black girls to the lowest rate on record, the government said Thursday.
Teen birth rates are down in every state. The reasons: less sex and more birth control, statistics indicate.
Black teen birth rates fell by nearly 21 percent between 1991 and 1996. In 1996, 9.2 percent of black teen-age girls gave birth, the lowest since the government began keeping that statistic. Donna Shalala, U.S. secretary of health and human services, credited the black community's "strategy of . . . sending the same consistent message that young blacks are cutting off their future if they have children."
Hispanic teens are now most likely to give birth, though their rates also fell, from 10.7 percent in 1995 to 10.2 percent in 1996, the first significant drop since 1991.
Teen birth rates in both minority groups remain more than double that of white teen-agers. In 1995, the latest year available for non-Hispanic whites, 3.9 percent of those teens had babies.
Nearly 500,000 American teen-agers give birth each year. In 1996, there was about one birth for every 20 girls ages 15-19, down 11.9 percent since 1991, according to the analysis released Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics.
Across Ohio, births to ages 15-19 were down 11.7 percent from 1991 to 1995. In Kentucky, they fell 9.2 percent; in Indiana, 4.9 percent.
Births to girls 16 and younger declined by 9.4 percent at three Cincinnati hospitals in 1996.
In 1995, sexual activity among American teens dropped for the first time since the government began tracking information in 1970. Fifty percent of girls had sex in 1995, down from 55 percent in 1990. The rate for boys dropped from 60 percent in 1988 to 55 percent in 1995.
Thursday's report comes amid intense efforts to reduce teen sex and pregnancy.
States are competing to see which can most dramatically reduce out-of-wedlock births, with winners sharing $100 million each year. And the 1996 welfare reform law gives states $50 million each year for programs to promote abstinence.
The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy is working with television networks to promote anti-pregnancy messages while it aids communities with their own programs.
On Thursday, the organization released a brochure to help parents become closer to their teen-agers, arguing that research shows teens are less likely to have sex -- and more likely to use birth control if they do -- if their parents are involved in their lives.
The highest teen birth rate was recorded in 1957, when nearly one in 10 girls gave birth. The rate was significantly higher throughout the 1950s and 1960s, but in those days the mothers were much more likely to be married. In 1950, just 23 percent of mothers 15 to 17 were unmarried; in 1996, it was 84 percent.
Teen pregnancy rates are more difficult to determine than teen birth rates, because data on the number of abortions and miscarriages must be added. In 1994, about half of teen pregnancies ended in birth.
Thursday's report showed that birth rates declined in every state, though the rates vary widely across the country. In Vermont, just 2.9 percent of teen-age girls have babies compared with 10.6 percent in the District of Columbia.
The differences among states are primarily due to the racial and ethnic makeup of the state. States with high black and Hispanic populations -- usually in the South or Southwest -- tend to have higher overall rates, said Stephanie Ventura, a demographer who helped write the report.
She noted, though, that minority birth rates vary widely among the states. In New York, for instance, 6.6 percent of black teen girls have babies; it's nearly double that in Wisconsin.
Hispanic women tend to have larger families and marry younger, both of which push up the teen birth rate. In 1995, 67 percent of Hispanic teen moms were unmarried compared to 95 percent of blacks.
In addition, most Hispanics are Roman Catholic and less likely to have an abortion than other teen-agers. About one in four pregnant Hispanics had abortions compared to 35 percent of blacks.
