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The Washington Post is reporting that new research suggests “that teens who spend the most time watching sexually charged television shows are twice as likely to become pregnant” or get someone else pregnant.
The newspaper cites the publication Pediatrics in the report but makes sure to differentiate between suggesting that this might be the reason for teen pregnancies as opposed to proving that it does.
The author of the study, Anita Chandra, a researcher with Rand Corporation says that “Not a lot of content on TV talks about the potential negative consequences of sex. Characters engage in sexual talk or activity, give positive attributes to sex, and there’s little discussion”. Chandra suggests that parents pay close attention to what their children watch.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control, “about one in every three girls gets pregnant before age 20” in this country. The report says that in 2006 alone, “more than 435,000 infants were born to mothers aged 15 to 19, and more than 80 percent of the births were estimated to have been unintended”.
The TV shows were not mentioned by the researchers saying that doing so would “divert attention from our core message that this kind of programming can have an impact on teen health, including pregnancy risk”.
The teens surveyed were those who were sexually active. After adjusting the results for factors such as race and parent’s education levels, researchers found that those who watched the most sexual programming “were still twice as likely to have gotten pregnant or gotten someone else pregnant since the start of the program” when compared to those surveyed who watched the least of the kind of programming.
The conclusion: overall 14 percent of those in the survey reported getting
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