New Hampshire has the country’s lowest teen pregnancy rate, according to a new study.
The report from the Guttmacher Institute, a DC-based think tank, says New Hampshire’s pregnancy rate stands at about half what it was in 1988. In 2010, the most recent year the study tracked, just three percent of teenage girls became pregnant in the Granite State. The national rate that same year stood at six percent.
Heather Boonstra is with the Guttmacher Institute.
New Hampshire has always taken a very reasonable approach to sex education itself. And so a kind of balanced approach that includes information about both abstinence and contraception.
Vermont, Massachusetts and Maine also ranked in the bottom five states for teen pregnancy.
Among other things, the report showed pregnancy rates differed by race. The birthrate for black teens in New Hampshire is 25 percent higher than the rate for whites, while the birthrate for Hispanic teens is almost 40 percent higher.
