36. Forget Plan B: To Fight Teen Pregnancy, Focus on Economic Opportunity

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/05/forget-plan-b-to-fight-teen-pregnancy-focus-on-economic-opportunity/275623/

On May 8th, Phillip Levine and Melissa Kearney wrote an article addressing the issue of teenage girls getting pregnant at an early age. The authors provide an alternative solution for the problem in the place of contraceptive pills, which has been a highly debated topic these last weeks. They start out by saying how the numbers of unwanted pregnancies have been increasing and that the methods to try and keep the amount from growing are not effective. Following this, they present data which demonstrate that the real reason for these pregnancies is not being affected, since the previous methods addressed other sources for the problem. They suggest their own solution to the problem and show some examples to support their ideas.

The purpose of this article was to inform the readers that the debate on whether contraceptives should be allowed at a certain age takes the focus away from the real problem. They want to persuade their readers that there is a better and more effective way to decrease teen birth rates. In order to do so, they address all the methods that attempted to do this. They started by saying what these were and how they failed to accomplish the appointed objectives and they also pointed out the positive sides in order to keep  the opposition more open and less ignorant. Besides creating common ground, the authors also use statistics and charts as well as examples to support the success of their proposed solution.