Public health workers say they'll have to rework programs aiming to cut teen pregnancies because of new research showing the fathers aren't fellow classmates - they're usually adult men.
A study in Thursday's American Journal of Public Health found two-thirds of the babies born to teenage mothers in California in 1993 were fathered by adult men who were, on average, four to six years older than the girls."This is important new information about the fathers because it tells us we can't just focus on adolescents," said Kristin Moore of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.
Pregnancy prevention education will have to target the military, job training programs, "places we haven't thought would need to address the teen pregnancy problem," she said.
U.S. teenagers give birth to more than half a million babies every year. Learning about the fathers has been a problem. Some 41 percent of the government-collected birth records of teen mothers omit the father's age.
But last summer, the Alan Guttmacher Institute combined birth certificates with an overlooked 1988 federal survey of 10,000 women to estimate fathers' ages. That study concluded that while 12 percent of the new mothers in 1988 were ages 15-19, just 5 percent of the new fathers were that young.