Michigan teens still having sex, but pregnancy rates are falling.

2004 FEB 5 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Fewer teenagers in Michigan and across the U.S. are having babies, reports the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Experts point to economic, social, and scientific factors and, significantly, shifting attitudes among girls like Elisse Ramey of Detroit, Michigan.

The 17-year-old student at the Cass Technical High School is involved in student government, sports, tutoring, and volunteering. Having a baby, Ramey said, would not only limit her participation in those activities but threaten her plans to own her own film production company.

"I don't plan to have sex until I'm married," Ramey told The Detroit News for a January 12, 2004, report. "So even if I did meet Mr. Wonderful, he would just have to wait.

"There was a time when I felt I wanted to be loved more, but I learned through being involved in different groups that I didn't need to find that from a child or a man, that I could find it within myself," she said.

According to the CDC, the teen birth rate has dropped 30% in the past decade to a historic low of 43 births per 1,000 women in 2002. In Michigan, teen births declined by 41% during that period.

The decline was even steeper among black teens, whose birth rate dropped by more than 40% nationwide from 114.8 births per 1,000 women in 1991 to 66.6 per 1,000 in 2002. According to Wayne State University, 64,606 babies were born to black Detroit teens ages 15-19 in 1990; that number had fallen to 35,176 in 2002.