Teen pregnancy rates are declining by significant margins, but there is still work to do!
In Iowa, teen pregnancy has declined by 56% since 1991, the peak year in teen birth rate. During the same period, the Illinois teen pregnancy rate has fallen by 55%. Education is the key to giving Quad City students the information they need to make good choices about their behavior, their relationships, and their future. Bethany for Children & Families offers Prevention Education programs free-of-charge to junior high and high school youth in the Quad Cities region. Bethany's Prevention Education programs are evidence-based curriculums taught in schools. They are designed to inform young people with medically-accurate information about personal responsibility, decision-making, self-esteem, appropriate behavior with their peers and romantic interests, puberty, their bodies, and much more. The objective of Prevention Education is to prevent unplanned pregnancies and to reduce risk to youth in our region, and to further Bethany’s mission to keep children safe, strengthen families, and build healthy communities.
The Prevention Education program at Bethany is so successful that the Wise Guys program offered in the Davenport School District was selected by Mathematica Policy Research as one of two sites for a nationwide study by the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) at the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. After two years of review of Bethany’s implementation of the Wise Guys curriculum to 7th grade boys in seven Davenport-area middle schools, the OPRE report lauded Bethany for Children & Families for its implementation the teen pregnancy prevention program that focuses, atypically, on male responsibility in teen pregnancy prevention efforts.
Despite these fantastic successes, funding for Bethany's Prevention Education is in jeopardy. The Illinois Department of Human Services slashed funding for teen pregnancy prevention education state-wide, putting teens at risk. At this time, there are no plans to reinstate funding. In 2010, the cost of teen childbearing in Illinois was $434 million dollars. Imagine the cost if the birth rate returns to 1991 levels! We must continue this essential programming. To support Teen Pregnancy Prevention Education in Illinois during the 2018 fiscal year, Bethany received grants from the Doris & Victor Day Foundation, the Moline Foundation, the Regional Development Authority, and the Rock Island Community Foundation. Without this local support, Bethany would not have been able to continue its work to ensure that adolescents and teens have the proper knowledge they need to value themselves, make smart choices, and grow into responsible adults
