PROGRAM AREAS - Preventing Teen PregnancyTeen Pregnancy is Everyone’s ProblemWashington, DC’s young people are one of our city’s most precious assets. Like every community, we want our children to thrive so that the District will be the great community we are all committed to it becoming.Among the many challenges our young people face, one of the most serious is the problem of teenage pregnancy. Every year one in sixteen teen girls in our city becomes pregnant, almost always unintentionally, and almost always without a husband. This however, compares favorably to the rate of one in four when we began to focus our program in 1998. Indeed, there has been an unprecedented and unpredictable decline in teen pregnancies of over 70% since 1993! This drop in the rate of teen pregnancy, if sustained, will positively affect the quality of life in our community for many years to come. Preventing Teen Pregnancy is a High Leverage ActionBecause teen pregnancy often accompanies other problems affecting our youth, preventing early pregnancy is a high leverage action that reaches to the heart of many social problems. The links between teen pregnancy and poverty, low birth weight babies, developmental and learning disabilities, crime, violence and sexual abuse are well documented and their impact on our community is obvious. In short, the level of teen pregnancy is a key indicator of the health of our community, with ramifications beyond the teens most directly affected. Addressing this issue sustainably will depend on our community putting in place a broad system that has an impact on the lives of all of our youth.
In 1998 the Summit Fund, along with others, committed itself to reducing
teen pregnancy in the District by 50% by the year 2005. The
most recent statistics available (2005) indicate a 57.7% drop
over the past seven years. This reduction exceeds the national
trends and is definitely cause for celebration. There is much more
that needs to be done to ensure that progress continues and is sustainable
over time. We seek to build on this record of accomplishment and make
the commitment to a pregnancy-free childhood the goal for our entire
community.
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  Are We There Yet? Fourteen year analysis of teen pregnancy data in Washington D.C. (PDF 370KB)
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