Teen pregnancy: Hip or blip?

Juno MacGuff and Britney Spears' 16-year-old pregnant sister are just two signs that teen pregnancy is “in,” Maclean's magazine suggests. But some experts disagree, citing statistics that show long-term teen pregnancy is not on the rise.

Jamie Lynn Spears, star of the Nickelodeon television series "Zoey 101," is getting a lot of tabloid attention for her pregnancy. MacGuff is the 16-year-old pregnant protagonist in the new movie "Juno." In the film, Juno decides to give the baby up for adoption.

In the article "Suddenly teen pregnancy is cool?" published Jan. 17 in the Canadian magazine, Cathy Gulli argued that a trend supporting underage motherhood was afoot, among celebrities and the larger population.

However, the Canadian teen birth rate dropped 38 percent from 1994 to 2004.

And the U.S. teen birth rate dropped consistently from 1991 to 2005, decreasing about 33 percent overall, according to the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. However, the 2006 report showed a 3 percent increase in the teen birth rate from the year before.

Experts were surprised by the change, and have debated whether it represents a fundamental shift or a blip.

"The increase is obviously noteworthy and certainly has our attention," said Bill Albert, deputy director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. "What nobody knows is why the rates have gone up."

Canada's data is not yet in from 2006.

Shifting social norms
However, Albert thinks young motherhood has lost some of its stigma. Despite the declines, 441,832 children were born to teens in the United States in 2006.

"I think one of the reasons why this country's rates of teen pregnancy are high is that we simply do not have a strong social norm that teen pregnancy is not OK," Albert told LiveScience. "I think that’s why the rates in Great Britain, Japan, Italy and the Netherlands are significantly lower compared to ours. There, there is a very strong social norm that there is a sequence to life's events, you don’t begin a family when you are 16 years old."