Title: Abortion Rates Highest Among Black Teens, Study Shows, But Accuracy May Be Hard To Measure | HuffPost
Headings: Abortion Rates Highest Among Black Teens, Study Shows, But Accuracy May Be Hard To Measure
Abortion Rates Highest Among Black Teens, Study Shows, But Accuracy May Be Hard To Measure
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Content: Abortion Rates Highest Among Black Teens, Study Shows, But Accuracy May Be Hard To Measure | HuffPost
BLACK VOICES
03/21/2013 03:10 pm ET Updated Jun 14, 2013
Abortion Rates Highest Among Black Teens, Study Shows, But Accuracy May Be Hard To Measure
By Jessica Cumberbatch Anderson
Teenage girls with pregnancy test
While the debate over New York City’s wildly criticized teen pregnancy prevention campaign rages on, a recent study conducted by the Guttmacher Institute may offer support to proponents of the PSA. According to the Institute’s state-by-state study of abortion rates among teens, black teenagers between 15 and 19 years old have an abortion rate of 41 per 1,000 women, more than twice the national average of 18 per 1,000. In comparison, white teenagers have an abortion rate of 10 per 1,000 women, which means that African-American teenagers are having abortions at a rate that is about four times higher than that of their white counterparts. In New York, the state with the highest abortion rate in the country, the situation is even more grim, with pregnancies among black teens — excluding miscarriages — resulting in abortion 67 percent of the time. But as convincing as the stats may be to those like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose tenure has served as a testing ground for aggressive public health campaigns like the recent teen pregnancy prevention PSAs, others say there’s no way to accurately measure how many abortions happen each year. The reason: Researchers’ methods of tracking abortions are complicated, Slate.com’s L.V. Anderson says. Download
Take the United States, for example, where the CDC collects data from state health agencies, though those agencies aren’t required to report abortion numbers to the CDC. According to Anderson: The CDC encourages agencies to ask abortion providers for the woman’s age, gestational stage, race, ethnicity, abortion type, the woman’s marital status, and the woman’s previous abortions and births, but not every state collects all this information, and some states (California, Delaware, Maryland, and New Hampshire) don’t report abortions to the CDC at all.