Teen pregnancy: trends and lessons learned.

Many of the provisions of the 1996 law overhauling the nation’s welfare system will expire at the end of the current fiscal year on September 30. The reauthorization process likely will set the stage for a major debate over one of the law’s main stated goals, reducing out-of-wedlock births, and how best to achieve it. Social conservatives favor programs and policies encouraging marriage and promoting abstinence from sexual intercourse outside of marriage for people of all ages. Others suggest that it would be more appropriate and more effective for policymakers to concentrate on finding ways to sustain recent declines in teenage pregnancy and childbearing, since half of first nonmarital births are to teens and almost eight in 10 teen pregnancies are unintended.