Life after Foster Care by Loring Paul Jones

Author:Loring Paul Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781440857416
Publisher: ABC-CLIO

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Pregnancy, Sexuality,

and Parenting

In 2014, there were 24.2 births for every 1,000 U.S. adolescent female ages 15–19. Almost 89 percent of these births occurred to single women. The 2014 teen birth rate had declined to 17.7 percent from 2012, when the birth rate was 26.5 per 1,000 adolescent females. Despite this decline, young women in America are at a high risk of an early, unplanned teen pregnancy compared with their counterparts in the developed world (Kost, 2016).

The risk of adolescent pregnancy is even greater for foster children. They are two or three times more likely to become pregnant than teens in the general population (Boonstra, 2011; Oshima, Narendorf, & McMillen, 2013; Shaw, Barth, Svoboda, & Shaikh, 2010). Midwest youth had children at over twice the rate of the ADD Health sample. Data from the National Youth in Transition Database (2014a, 2014b) found that at age 17, 17.7 percent of the former foster youth (FFY) had a child. A Maryland study found the rate for adolescent pregnancy among foster youth was 92.7 per thousand compared to 32.7 per thousand in the state’s general population (Shaw et al., 2010). California researchers who used a probability sample of adolescents found the rate of pregnancy for 15- to 17-year-old females in foster care was 30.2 per thousand, while the state’s rate for girls of the same age who had never been in care was 20.0 per thousand (King, Putnam-Hornstein, Cederbaum, & Needell, 2014). In Arizona, Stott (2012) found that 17.4 percent of the 18-year-olds in her sample were currently pregnant, and 22.2 percent of the 19-year-olds were pregnant. The state’s pregnancy rate at the time of her study was 10.5 percent for 18-year-olds and 13.9 percent for those youth age 19. Gotbaum (2005) found approximately 16 percent of New York City females in care (ages 13 to 21) were pregnant. About 17 percent of young women served by Casey Family Programs had at least one child while in care (Pecora, Williams, et al., 2003). Seventeen percent of the young women in the National Youth in Transition Database (NYTD) sample had birthed a child while they were 18 or 19, and 6 percent of males in that data base had become fathers. Twelve percent of the overall sample had become parents (National Youth in Transition Database, 2014a, 2014b).

The Casey Young Adult Survey (CYAS) reported that by age 25, 38 percent of the sample had given birth or fathered a child. Twenty-six percent of the pregnancies were planned (Havalchak, White, & O’Brien, 2008). Singer (2004) reported that 31 percent of females who emancipated from Utah’s foster care system had become pregnant by age 24. Both Berzin (2008) and Buehler, Orme, Post, & Patterson (2000) used nationally representative samples to compare the experiences of former foster youth (FFY) with the general population. They also selected a low-income matched group that was similar to the FFY except for the experience of being in out-of-home care for further comparisons. Berzin (2008), using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, found

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