83% of Latinos believe teen pregnancy is a major problem in their community compared to other social problems, according to a survey released today by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancies.
More than three-quarters of Latinos surveyed, 78%, believe that more efforts should be made to prevent teenage pregnancy in one country, the United States, which heads the ranking of the industrialized world with the highest number of teenage gestations.
The executive director of the campaign, Ginny Ehrlich, said in a statement that “despite the extraordinary decline in teenage pregnancies and maternity, about one in four teens still get pregnant at age 20.”
Ehrlich said that young Latinas, along with African Americans, are “disproportionately more likely to experience an unplanned pregnancy” because of the higher poverty rate in these communities.
According to the survey, conducted from 2,314 interviews last April, many Hispanics also have the perception that this problem has worsened over the past decade, although actual figures point to the opposite.
The National Campaign to Prevent Adolescent and Unplanned Pregnancies said the numbers are “surprising” since, since the record reached in the early 1990s, adolescent pregnancy declined by 55% and women’s births Younger people fell 64%.
But in the interviews, 42% of respondents believed that unwanted teenage pregnancies increased in the last ten years, while 28% said they had declined and 20% said they remained the same.
The perception of Latinos regarding the increase in this type of pregnancy is the highest in the survey, which also analyzes two other groups: African Americans and whites.
With regard to African Americans, 39% believed that there are now more unwanted pregnancies, 80% felt that there should be more efforts to address this situation in their communities and 84% said that it was a matter of importance with respect to others problems.
The whites appear in the third place of the survey, 82% said that they think that this is a major problem, 73% of them are in favor of greater efforts in this area and only 31% said that unwanted pregnancies became acute.
Despite improvements in recent years, the organizers of the survey said that they have not yet achieved their “mission”.
