Florida knows more about the pitfalls of unsafe sex than most any other state.

The state ranked third from the top in the number of teen births per state in 2006. It had more abortions than 42 of 44 other states reporting data in 2005, and it had more cumulative AIDS cases than 47 other states in 2007.

February 2, 2009 

Concerned health experts are scratching their heads trying to determine why the nation's teen birth rate suddenly increased after declining for about 15 years.

Various claims have put the blame on abstinence-only education; on comprehensive sex education; the media, including TV and movies, for glamorizing young mothers; and on demographic and cultural changes.

Most, however, seem to agree that pre-teens must become more aware about the consequences of teen pregnancy and births.

"To see 26 states with statistically significant increases is fairly remarkable," says Paul Sutton, a demographer with the National Center for Health Statistics, which released the data Wednesday. "We're seeing increases in both the number of teens having births and also the rate at which they are having births. Both of them are going up."

MONDAY, Dec. 29 (HealthDay News) -- Teens who take virginity pledges are just as likely to have sex as teens who don't make such promises -- and they're less likely to practice safe sex to prevent disease or pregnancy, a new study finds.

With the election ending only a couple of weeks ago, Planned Parenthood of South Florida and the Treasure Coast wasted no time training 12 new public policy advocates at its Young Activist Advocacy Institute, which was held on Saturday, November 15^th in Fort Lauderdale.

Florida law mandates that sex-education programs in public schools teach "abstinence from sexual activity as the expected standard for all school-age children while teaching the benefits of monogamous heterosexual marriage."


But many Volusia County students don't live in that Ward-and-June world.

The United States has the highest rates of teen pregnancy and births in the western industrialized world. Teen pregnancy costs the United States at least $9 billion annually. Thirty-one percent of young women become pregnant at least once before they reach the age of 20—about 750,000 a year. Eight in 10 of these pregnancies are unintended and 81 percent are to unmarried teens.

Teen Pregnancy Costs to the State:

Between 1991 and 2004 there have been more than 354,000 teen births in Florida, costing taxpayers a total of $8.1 billion over this period.