Megan Tackney, Outreach Manager for Health and Reproductive Rights

by Megan Tackney, Program Associate,
National Women’s Law Center 

Latinas have the highest teen pregnancy rate of any racial or ethnic group in the country.  A staggering 53 percent of Latina teens get pregnant at least once before age 20. That’s nearly twice the national average.  As explained in our report released last week, Listening to Latinas: Barriers to High School Graduation, this is one of many factors contributing to the high dropout rate for Latinas. Forty-one percent of Latina students do not graduate with their class in four years—if they graduate at all. And Latinas’ high teen pregnancy rate both reflects and reinforces the stereotypes and barriers they face.

Over the course of the last year, through surveys, interviews, and focus groups, we heard from over 300 Latina teens, some who are teen parents and many more who know girls who got pregnant and either dropped out of high school or considered doing so. And in a recent survey of dropouts by the Gates Foundation, close to one-half of female dropouts said that becoming a parent played a role in their decisions to leave school, while one-third said it was a major factor.

Why is the pregnancy rate for Latinas so high? Many of the girls we interviewed did not have access to comprehensive, medically accurate sex education. In some regions, where schools offer an abstinence-only curriculum, girls could not get reliable or helpful information about contraception. And many of the girls we interviewed reported that their parents did not talk to them about sex or pregnancy prevention either – if the subject was addressed at all, it was indirectly, with vague warnings like “don’t end up like your cousin.”