No matter where one stands on the polarizing abortion issue, there should be broad agreement that the latest news about teen pregnancies, issued by the Guttmacher Institute this week, is not good news:For the first time in 10 years, the teen pregnancy rate rose 3 percent in 2006, the most recent year for nationwide statistics; about 750,000 American women younger than 20 became pregnant that year.

That increase reflected the 4 percent increase in teen births and 1 percent increase in teen abortions.The increases speak to both individual and collective failures to effectively teach our children — young women and  young men — about the risks and responsibilities of sexual engagement.

They're either not hearing the message about consequences, or they're not getting the message. The result is more kids are having kids: After declines among all racial and ethnic groups through 2005, all rose in 2006. In announcing the turn-around, Guttmacher reported, “The significant drop in teen pregnancy rates in the 1990s was overwhelmingly the result of more and better use of contraceptives among sexually active teens.

However, this decline started to stall out in the early 2000s, at the same time that sex education programs aimed exclusively at promoting abstinence — and prohibited by law from discussing the benefits of contraception — became increasingly widespread and teens' use of contraceptives declined.”

The institute also cited other possible contributors to the rise: shifts in racial and ethnic populations, poverty, changes in attitudes toward teen and unintended pregnancy.

Naturally pro-abstinence advocates decried Guttmacher's focus on abstinence education, but it is difficult to see how the roughly $1 billion spent by the federal government on abstinence-only education for teens paid off in these numbers, and in the young lives behind those numbers which are forever changed by not abstaining from sex, or by not using methods of birth control while having sex. The teen themselves, and the children they have, face additional challenges involving family, health and educational issues.

The Guttmacher Institute does not conclude whether the increase is short-term or the beginning of a rising trend. “Either way,” said Lawrence Finer, the group's director of domestic research, “it is clearly time to redouble our efforts to make sure our young people have the information, interpersonal skills and health services they need to prevent unwanted pregnancies and to become sexually healthy adults.”

He's right. The nation needs to do better by its teenagers, especially when it comes to helping them to understand the seriousness of sex and its consequences, and the options that are available should they not practice abstinence.