Sunday, April 10, 2016

How This MTV Show Led to a Major Decline in Teen Pregnancy – Fortune

Watching naked 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 inspired that the higher price of teenage pregnancy is among 6 significant 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 inspired that the MTV reveal 16 and Pregnant “led to a lot more searches and tweets concerning birth regulate and abortion, which might have actually contributed to a 5.7% reduction in teen births in the 18 months adhering to its introduction, which is one-3rd of the general decline in U.S. teen births throughout that period.”

The naked truth show, which follows teen mothers in their day-to-day lives, was initially developed in 2009 and later spun off in to Teen Mom and Teen Mom 2, which featured numerous of the exact same moms from the original series.

Seeing firsthand the sacrifices that the women in the reveal make—from points as small as rejecting the prom to not finishing school—is a lot 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 naked truth programming and EVP of collection progress for MTV.

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Dolgen says she helped make the show, in part, to educate MTV’s young audience. “I had read an write-up concerning teen pregnancy [that cited] this truly staggering lot of teen pregnancies in the U.S. I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is forever affecting our audience, we have actually to talk concerning it,’” Dolgen says.

That number is indeed staggering: Roughly 600,000 women in between 15 and 19 come to be pregnant every year, according to McKinsey. That’s a lot more compared to in any type of various other produced country, and closer to the lot of teen pregnancies in African countries adore 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 significant expenditure for the U.S. In 2010, teen births expenditure the country nearly $10 billion in public assistance, good health 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 uneasy conversation, it’s a conversation we should have,” she says.