Behind Fall in Pregnancy, a New Teenage Culture of Restraint

YOUNG LOVE, NEW CAUTION

Sunday, March 7, 2004
By Nina Bernstein

New York Times Writer

Ten days ago, she heard that Alberto was spicing up the public version of their stale romance by bragging to his friends about their lovemaking. On the advice of the girls on her swim team, she countered his invention by spreading one of her own, disparaging his sexual performance. Underneath the raunchy tit for tat was emotional turmoil, which erupted during a telephone call. Jasmine called Alberto a loser. Alberto declared the relationship dead. Jasmine agreed. Or maybe not. "If he calls to say he's sorry," she asked, "should I take him back?"

Jasmine and Alberto, 16-year-old sweethearts in the Bronx, resolved early in their up-and-down romance to remain virgins.

Image Credit: Suzanne DeChillo -- NYT

Alberto and Jasmine are 16-year-old sweethearts, or were until that day in November when Jasmine, who planned to be a virgin until marriage, learned in the halls of DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx that Alberto was "messing around."

She raged, she wept and she broke up with him. He apologized, he cried and she took him back. Then she suggested they cut school and have sex — "to keep him," she explained tearfully.

It could have been one of the oldest stories in the book, except for the real-life ending: Alberto said no.

Though he is just one teenager — short and freckled, with close-cropped kinky hair, a Hispanic surname and an electric smile — his personal decision speaks to the underlying causes of an extraordinary demographic shift.

The teenage pregnancy rate in America, which rose sharply between 1986 and 1991 to huge public alarm, has fallen steadily for a decade with little fanfare, to below any level previously recorded in the United States. And though pregnancy prevention efforts have long focused almost exclusively on girls, it is boys whose behavior shows the most startling changes.

More than half of all male high school students reported in 2001 that they were virgins, up from 39 percent in 1990. Among the sexually active, condom use has soared to 65 percent, and nearly 73 percent among black male students. The trends are similar, if less pronounced, for female students, who remain slightly less likely than boys to report that they have had sex. Nowhere are the changes more surprising than in poor minority neighborhoods in Harlem and the Bronx, which a decade ago were seen as centers of a national epidemic of teenage pregnancy.

Researchers often sum up the findings in one tidy phrase: "less sex, more contraception." But there is nothing simple about their puzzlement over the reasons.

"The default position is 'Yahoo, let's have sex,' " said Sarah Brown, director of the private, nonprofit National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. "It takes some motivation in a highly sexualized culture for teenagers not to have sex. To use contraception takes a lot of motivation."

"I think there's something very profound going on. I don't think anybody understands in depth this change in teen culture."

Experts can rattle off a litany of possible reasons for the turnaround: the fear of AIDS, and the impact of AIDS-prevention education; the introduction of injectable forms of birth control; changes in welfare policy and crackdowns on fathers for child support; the rise of a more religious and conservative generation of teenagers; an economic boom with more opportunities; and an array of new youth programs, especially those stressing both abstinence and contraception.

Even advocates of these developments agree that they cannot account for the shift, or predict how long it will last. Yet the cultural changes now at work are quite astonishing when viewed up close, in the lives of teenagers themselves. In their topsy-turvy world of explicit sex and elusive intimacy, young people yearning for human contact are distilling new codes of conduct from a volatile blend of sex education, popular culture and family experience.

The patterns and contradictions unfold in the secret life of Alberto R. and Jasmine O., in an all-boys discussion group at a Harlem school clinic, and in the cellphone riffs and sidewalk banter of many other teenagers.

The range of attitudes toward sex is striking. Two high school buddies, Toby M. and Manuel R., are miles apart in their sexual choices at 18, though both are veterans of the same cutting-edge reproductive health program for boys at their Harlem public high school, Bread and Roses Integrated Arts.

Toby, lanky and talkative, counts five partners since he lost his virginity in the seventh grade, with a girl his own age: 12. "I wasn't stupid," he insisted. "We did it correctly. We used a condom."

His buddy Manuel, who mentions that his stepsister gave birth at 12, says he intends to forgo sex until marriage, as his Pentecostal church demands. But in explaining his abstinence, he also credits the safe-sex pamphlets his older sister sneaked home from a Planned Parenthood clinic, and the Lifetime channel they watched together.

"Every other movie on that channel is, like, a teenage mother crying or a woman getting beat," he explained. "And my older sister, who is sexually active, we'd just be watching TV and she'd be, like, 'You do know how that happens, don't you?' "

Outside, where students from several high schools flow to the West 135th Street subway stops on Edgecombe Avenue, the spirit of hip-hop music videos prevails.

"All the dudes, like now, we're strapping up," boasted a 15-year-old in a fashionably flat-billed cap, within earshot of a group of girls. Another boy of 15 quoted a different expression for using a condom: "I wrapped the rubber tighter," from a song by the rap star Jay-Z. The lyric is not part of a paean to safe sex, just a contemporary take on a timeless theme: Women cannot be trusted.

Soon the girls on the block were protesting that spin on the familiar double standard. They complained that except for docile types deemed "wifey material," girls risk being branded as "slides," "hos" or "skeezers," while the boy having sex with them is called a "player" and wins high-fives from his friends.

In a field mired in ideology, the voices of such teenagers challenge all camps. From the right, critics of comprehensive sex education argue that it gives young people a dangerously mixed message: Don't have sex, but if you do, protect yourself. From the left, opponents of abstinence-only education say it is based on a lie: Sex before marriage will only hurt you.

But these teenagers cannot escape mixed messages about sex, or the complications of deciding if, when and how to sample it. They are picking from a new multiple-choice menu, where virginity and oral sex can coexist and erotic rap makes the case for condoms. And between the lines, they are feeling all the old emotional conflicts: jealousy, ambition, loneliness, love.

* A Couple's Complex Dance

* Switching Signals

* A Turnabout for Boys

* Trying to Save Face

(More: NYTimes.com / New York Region)

2004 © The New York Times Company.

Dan