available) were 66.4 births per 1,000, 65.7 in New Jersey, 62.1 in Florida and 55.3 in New York. While those numbers are still much higher than the birth rate among white teens, they are considerably lower than several Southeastern
states. Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee all saw more than 120 births for every 1,000 Hispanic teens in the same year.
The question is: Why did states such as Florida, New York and California do so well? Vicki Cardoza, a project coordinator for the Institute for Hispanic Health in New York, thinks there's a good explanation for that. In states with established Hispanic communities, there are education and outreach programs to help teens learn about sex and birth control. In addition, she said, there may be community clinics where health care providers speak Spanish.
By contrast, in many of the Southeastern states with high Hispanic teen birth rates, many Hispanics may be recent arrivals either from other states or other countries.
"In states like Georgia and Alabama, these are new populations," she said. "In that case, you have all these factors, like culture change, people move there and don't know where to get their health care, you don't know where to get treatment, there are language barriers." In addition, many Hispanic parents do not talk to their children about sex and certainly not about contraception, she said. The Hispanic kids may not be engaging in sex any more than other teens, she said, but they may have less access to contraceptives. READ MORE
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