In case you missed it, there was some good news from Milwaukee on Friday – regarding that city’s teen birth rate. City health officials reported that the rate of births to teens ages 15 through 17 in Milwaukee dropped in 2011 for the fifth straight year, and it has declined 36% since 2006.
The following chart, which is from the Journal Sentinel’s article about the new data, clearly illustrates the very substantial decline over the last five years. Particularly impressive is the 52% drop among Hispanic teens (ages 15 through 17) – from 71.3 per thousand in 2006 to 33.9 in 2011. The overall rate of 33.4 is closing in on the goal of 30.0 per thousand teens ages 15 to17, which is the target for 2015 that was set in 2007 by United Way of Greater Milwaukee, the Center for Urban Population Health and the Milwaukee Health Department.
The teen birth rate has been coming down across the country in recent years. From 2006 to 2010, the national birth rate for teens ages 15 to 17 year fell 21%, from 22.0 to 17.3 (per thousand females), and Wisconsin’s rate dropped from 15.6 to 11.7, or 25%. (For more WI stats, see the DHS publication Births to Teens in Wisconsin, 2010.)
In Milwaukee it has been falling even faster – 31% during that specific period – which I think can be attributed to the combined efforts of the City Health Department, Milwaukee Public Schools, United Way and other community groups. The Journal Sentinel article briefly summarizes some of those collaborative efforts, and it describes a new $700,000 per year teen pregnancy prevention initiative at one of the charter schools in Milwaukee. The new initiative is modeled after a successful program in New York City, which has spread to several other cities.
Although Milwaukee still has a long way to go to – with a birth rate among 15 to 17 year olds that is roughly twice the national average – the progress over the last five years is heartening. Teen pregnancy is an extremely important issue to tackle because teen births put upward pressure on the poverty rate, and poverty tends to drive the rate of births among teens even higher. Breaking that cycle is critical for alleviating poverty in Milwaukee and reducing the racial and ethnic disparities.
Read more about the costs on the website of The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, and see their Wisconsin fact sheet: Counting it up: The public costs of teen childbearing in Wisconsin.
Jon Peacock
