Can Racy Television Lead To Teen Pregnancy?
Study shows a link between racy television and teen pregnancy.
On Monday, Yahoo! News reported a strong link between teen pregnancies and sexy TV shows. The article refers to a groundbreaking study that was released in the November issue of Pediatrics and explains the connection between teenagers and the racy television shows that they watch.
Can anyone take a wild guess at what super-sexy shows the study is alluding to? Here's a hint: sex is actually in the title. Obviously Carrie Bradshaw, Miranda Hobbes, Samantha Jones, and Charlotte York are four fictional characters, but they are all a part of a very realistic, controversial show--a show that is now on cable TV every night. Though it is censored, Sex and the City revolves around, well, sex. Therefore, when flipping through the channels, an impressionable teenager may just stop surfing when he/she stumbles upon an almost fully nude Samantha receiving oral sex.
According to behavioral scientist Anita Chandra (lead-author of the study), teens who watched the raciest shows were twice as likely to become pregnant over the next three years as those who watched few such programs. Besides SATC, two other shows considered to have a lot of sexual content are That 70's Show and Friends. All three shows ended, but re-runs are constantly being shown on cable TV.
As far as numbers go:
It involved 2,003 12- to 17-year-old girls and boys nationwide questioned by telephone about their TV viewing habits in 2001. Teens were re-interviewed twice, the last time in 2004, and asked about pregnancy. Among girls, 58 became pregnant during the follow-up, and among boys, 33 said they had gotten a girl pregnant.
YourTango's Genevieve Lill recently wrote a Love Buzz on conservative teens having sex earlier than other groups. But are the teens in the aforementioned study considered conservative? It doesn't seem accurate to label a person conservative or liberal just because he/she watched a television show.
Tell us what you think about this study. Does it make sense that teens who watch "racy" TV are more likely to engage in sexual intercourse as opposed to teens who don't watch these shows?
Discussion
I wrote about this controversial study on my blog Smart Girls Know. I think the problem doesn't lie in the sexually explicit content in these shows...it's the fact that the notion of birth control, or STDs for that matter, are rarely, if ever, discussed. Couple that with a growing trend in abstinence-only approach becoming increasingly popular in schools, and it's no surprise that we'd see an increase in pregnancies. The study also notes, though, that overall, teen pregnancy rates in the U.S. have declined in the past 15 years. http://tiny.cc/PIHRC
