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With an estimated 11.6 million teenagers now sexually active, a few schools have begun dispensing birth control devices and establishing day-care facilities for students. The research organization known as SIECUS (Sex Information and Education Council of the United States) reports that one of every two boys age fifteen to seventeen has had sex. Nearly half of girls fifteen to nineteen years old have had sex and one of every two is sexually active. The National Center for Health Statistics reports that only one in five women waits for marriage to have sex.
Sexual activity among teens leads to pregnancy, which leads to abortion. Almost half of teenage girls who become pregnant have abortions, which accounts for a third of all abortions in the United States. Abortion seems to be most common among the affluent; upper-middle-class girls view it as a means of birth control.
It is estimated that 40 percent of today is fourteen-year-old girls will become pregnant at least once before they are twenty. The United States has the highest incidence of teenage motherhood in any Western country, 52 per thousand as compared with 32 per thousand in Great Britain. Two out of three pregnant girls drop out of school.
Nearly half of the black females in the U.S. become pregnant by age twenty, and 90 percent of black babies are born out of wedlock; most are raised in fatherless homes.
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