Teen pregnancy rates soar

Young women in Pettis County are more likely to have children than their counterparts in all but a handful of Missouri counties. Pettis County ranked 99th in 2006 among Missouri’s 114 counties in births to women between the ages of 15 and 19.

Their rate of childbirth is 31 percent higher than their peers in the nine adjacent counties, and 64 percent above that of their peers in Johnson County alone.

Bucking national trends, the teen birth rate in Pettis County has gone up 20 percent over the last five years, according to data collected by the state and reported by Citizens for Missouri’s Children in its annual Kids Count survey.

In 2006, the last year for which data is available, Pettis County teenagers had 102 children, up from 82 in 2002. Nine had abortions, down from 12 in 2002.

Even accounting for the number of pregnancies terminated, teenagers in Pettis County are getting pregnant more often.

Teenage pregnancy in the county is not a new issue. Linda Kirk, director of housing and youth services for the Pettis County Community Partnership, said the issue was ranked highest by residents in the organization’s community needs assessment for 1998.

In 2004, teen pregnancy dropped to third on the survey’s results, behind adult and childhood obesity.

“I think there’s a community perception that it’s better than it was, and it’s not better than it was when you look at the Kids Count information. We still have a lot we need to do,” she said.

In 1998, Pettis County teenagers had babies more often than their peers in 95 out of 114 Missouri counties. In 2006, Pettis County ranked 99th.

Kirk said the partnership introduced new programs to help combat the high teen pregnancy rate at that time.

The partnership purchased the Baby Think It Over parenthood simulators in 1999. The Teen Pregnancy Prevention Coalition was formed, and the partnership introduced several abstinence-only pregnancy prevention programs for school districts in the county. Those efforts, and others, are ongoing.

Between 1999 and 2002, the teen pregnancy rate in the county, while still higher than the state averages for those years, decreased. Between 2002 and 2006, the county rate increased steadily from 59.7 per 1,000 to 74.8. The state rate decreased between 2002 and 2005, from 44.0 to 42.4, before increasing to 45.6 in 2006, a 3.6 percent increase for the five-year period.

Kirk cannot explain the high teen pregnancy rate in the county.

“We know it’s still a problem, and it doesn’t change overnight,” she said. The partnership works with public health officials in neighboring counties, but there are few answers to the problem.

Kirk said, “It’s frustrating to look at counties surrounding us” that have lower rates.

In neighboring Johnson County, the rate in 2002 was 29.8 per 1,000, and 27.0 in 2006.

Judy Schache, public health nurse at Johnson County Community Health Services, said there was no clear reason why Johnson County’s rate was far below that of the state and of Pettis County, although she thinks it may be linked to education.

Almost 13 percent of children in Johnson County were born to a mother without a high school diploma, and almost 19 percent are in a single-parent home. In Pettis County, nearly 29 percent of children were born to a mother without a high school diploma, and 23.2 percent are in a single-parent home.

According to the data provided in Kids Count for 2006, nearly half of students in Pettis County are enrolled in the free and reduced price lunch program, a measure of income. In Johnson County, 35 percent of students are enrolled in the program.

There is also a greater proportion of children receiving food stamps in Pettis than in Johnson, 37.3 percent versus 22.3 percent, and more are enrolled in Medicaid, 39.3 percent versus 23.9 percent.

Johnson County has typically had a low teen pregnancy rate, Schache said, and it is not a public health focus for the county. The organization does not conduct pregnancy prevention programs, she said, but focuses its efforts on different issues.

“We don’t seem to have the same rate they do there,” she said.

agualtieri@sedaliademocrat.com