The Hot Shot

By Jeffrey Kluger

By rights, nobody should be terribly pleased to learn that there were 890,000 teenage pregnancies in the U.S. in 1995. When the just compiled figures for that year were released last week, however, most public-health agencies were positively aglow--and with good reason: the number is the lowest it's been in more than 20 years. Among African Americans the news was even better. You'd have to go back 40 years to find a time when there were fewer pregnant teens.

One cause of the plunging figure is increased teenage abstinence, but another is that more and more girls are turning to an injectable form of birth control known as Depo-Provera. A hormone-based drug that works principally by blocking ovulation, it is the contraceptive of choice for 8% of white teens seeking birth control and 19% of blacks. This is a relatively modest demand compared to that for birth-control pills, but it's a stampede for a drug that wasn't even available in the U.S. until 1993.

The reasons for such popularity are obvious. Unlike condoms, Depo-Provera is a set-it-and-forget-it form of birth control. Unlike the Pill, which demands compliance with a daily dosing schedule, Depo-Provera requires a single visit to a doctor's office for one injection every three months.

What appeals to teens, however, may not appeal to parents. As with the Pill, spontaneous intercourse can mean more intercourse. Worse, when a girl can slip off to a clinic after soccer practice and return home undetectably injected with three months' worth of birth control, parents are taken straight out of the supervisory loop.

But Depo-Provera works, and for many communities plagued by teen pregnancies, that's what counts. Says Steve Trombley, president of Planned Parenthood in Chicago: "The word is out in the community about the three-month shot." With nobody wanting to return to the soaring teen-pregnancy rate of old, that word is likely to remain out--at least until even more kids remember the option of simply saying no.

--By Jeffrey Kluger. Reported by Alice Park/New York