Dollars and Sense
Measuring the Cost of Teen Sex
The human cost of teen sexual activity is easy
enough to measure in the many thousands of new cases
of sexually transmitted infections each year and the
high teen pregnancy rate.
The figures seem numbing, yet each number is the
life of a young person whose hopes for the future is
inalterably changed due to a sexually transmitted
infection that may be incurable, or a pregnancy that
a teen girl struggles to deal with.
The economic cost of teen sexual activity is a bit
more difficult to determine. After all, how do you
put a price tag on a young person’s health, dreams,
goals and hopes for a healthy and productive life?
Yet the reality is that some people don’t understand
a problem unless it is expressed in dollars and
cents, so it may be worthwhile to consider the
economic loss caused by the many negative outcomes
that result from teen sex.
Counting the cost of health care – including a
higher rate of complications and early
hospitalization among pregnant teens – welfare and
other means of public assistance that young people
use for themselves and their children, one study
places the cost of teen pregnancy nationally at $9.1
billion per year.1 The cost in New York
state alone is at least $421 million per year in
federal, state and local subsidies. Add to these
figures the high public health care costs for
sexually transmitted infections among teens, and the
total cost of teen sexual activity skyrockets.
Although the focus of the Healthy Respect abstinence
until marriage program is not on economics but on
the individual students we meet in the classroom –
their health, their physical and emotional
well-being, and their future prospects in the world
– it is helpful at times to remember the benefits
that abstinence can “pay” to the larger society.
Abstinent teens do not get pregnant or contract
sexually transmitted infections. Thus, they do not
access public assistance at the rates that sexually
active teens do.
This is something to think about when we consider
the cost of funding abstinence programs. Abstinence
more than pays for itself in the economic ledger.
The benefits for the teens themselves are priceless.
1The
November 2006 study by the National Campaign to
Prevent Teen Pregnancy (www.teenpregnancy.org/costs)
estimated costs for public health care, child
welfare, eventual incarceration of sons of teen
parents, and lost tax revenue due to decreased
earnings and spending.