August
12, 2000
LOS
ANGELES- The birth rate among teenagers has dropped, but young
women still have nearly half a million babies each year,
President Clinton said Saturday in promoting second-chance
homes that provide job counseling and parenting skills.
"These homes provide teenage moms and their babies
with an environment that is safe, supportive and
supervised," Clinton said in his radio address, which he
taped on Air Force One while flying to Los Angeles to attend
the Democratic National Convention.
"The teens get the help they need to finish school.
They learn how to care for their children and manage a budget.
Some homes also work with teen fathers."
Clinton urged Congress to provide $25 million to start more
second-chance homes.
He also directed the secretaries of the Health and Human
Services and Housing and Urban Development departments to make
it easier for community- and religion-based groups to acquire
vacant or foreclosed property to create more second-chance
homes for teen parents. The government, he said, would give
communities a road map of federal and state resources they can
use to set up more of these homes.
"I read of one young Massachusetts woman who got
pregnant at 14, and soon was estranged from her family with no
place to live," Clinton said. "With the help of a
second-chance home, she got back on her feet, trained at a
community college and has left welfare to become a proud,
working mother."
The president cited a report this week by the federal
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that teenagers are
having babies at the lowest rate in at least 60 years. For
every 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19, there were about 50 births
last year, the lowest level since the statistic was first
recorded six decades ago.
If the teen birth rate had remained at its peak in 1991,
teen mothers would have given birth to 120,000 more babies
this year, Clinton said.
Explaining the drop-off in teen births, analysts said the
HIV virus and AIDS became mainstream enough in the 1990s to
scare teenagers, while awareness of other sexually transmitted
diseases was at an all-time high. They said ad campaigns,
community awareness groups and even seeing friends have
children encouraged teens to be more careful - or stop having
sex entirely.
