Watching honest truth TV can easily be helpful for you—especially if you’re a teenage girl.
A study released on Thursday by the McKinsey Global Institute motivated that the higher fee of teenage pregnancy is among 6 severe factors holding women spine in the U.S. One efficient device for lowering that number? Media, according to the report.
McKinsey cites a 2014 study that motivated that the MTV prove to 16 and Pregnant “led to much more searches and tweets concerning birth manage and abortion, which might have actually contributed to a 5.7% reduction in teen births in the 18 months complying with its introduction, which is one-3rd of the general decline in U.S. teen births throughout that period.”
The honest truth show, which follows teen mothers in their everyday lives, was initially made in 2009 and later spun off in to Teen Mom and Teen Mom 2, which featured lots of of the very same moms from the original series.
Seeing firsthand the sacrifices that the women in the prove to make—from points as small as rejecting the prom to not finishing school—is much more powerful compared to being told not to have actually unprotected sex by a teacher or parent, says Lauren Dolgen, creator of the show, head of west coast honest truth programming and EVP of collection improvement for MTV.
Sign up: Click below to subscribe to the Broadsheet, Fortune’s everyday newsletter on the world’s the majority of powerful women.
Dolgen says she helped produce the show, in part, to educate MTV’s young audience. “I had read an write-up regarding teen pregnancy [that cited] this truly staggering lot of teen pregnancies in the U.S. I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is permanently affecting our audience, we have actually to talk regarding it,’” Dolgen says.
That number is indeed staggering: About 600,000 women in between 15 and 19 come to be pregnant every year, according to McKinsey. That’s much more compared to in any sort of various other created country, and closer to the lot of teen pregnancies in African countries love Botswana and Djibouti, notes Kweilin Ellingrud, lead author of the McKinsey report.
Aside from being an emotional and financial burden on the mothers themselves, teen pregnancy comes at a substantial expense for the U.S. In 2010, teen births expense the country nearly $10 billion in public assistance, healthiness care, and lost income from the mothers, according to the report.
While McKinsey cites income inequality as the main driving pressure behind youth pregnancies, Dolgen says the number one issue for the girls in MTV’s shows lack is education.
“Also if it’s an awkward conversation, it’s a conversation we have to have,” she says.
