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Show Teen sex worry adults Perhaps, adolescents place themselves them-selves at greater risk because of their false sense of invulnerability. Teen-agers are well known for believing in the personal fable that "it won't happen to me." During the 1980s an even graver concern was raised about sexual behaviors which raise the risk of being be-ing infected by the deadly AIDS virus. AIDS is still not very common com-mon among adolescents, but that's no reason for complacency about teen-agers and AIDS. The disease has a long period of latency estimated to be from 7 to 10 yearsbetween being infected with the virus and showing the symptoms of AIDS. This means many young adults in their 20s who now have AIDS were infected with the virus when they t were teen-agers. This was the subject sub-ject of a recent People Magazine cover story about an attractive young woman. "When she was 16 her date came with champagne, roses-and AIDS." The facts that I have sketched out here make a compelling case for our need to understand better and, I hope, to delay, prevent or reduce the risk of early teen-age sexual involvement. By DR. BRENT MILLER, Ph.D. College of Family Life Utah State University There are many reasons to be concerned about adolescent sexuality. sexuali-ty. Parents have always worried about sex among teens for moral and practical reasons, and unintended unintend-ed pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases are certainly nothing new among teen-agers. But we haven't clearly understood the scope of these problems until the 1980s. During the last decade it became apparent that teen-agers in the United States are much more likely to become pregnant, or to cause a pregnancy, than teens in other developed de-veloped countries. It is now widely known that more than one million teen-age women in the U.S. become pregnant each year. It's true that most of these are older teen-agers, and some of them are married. However, in the last few years for which data are available, more than 400,000 pregnancies occurred among teens age 17 or younger, and about 30,000 pregnancies occurred annually annu-ally among those 14 or younger. Can you imagine 30,000 pregnant preg-nant 12, 13 and 14-year-olds? It also has become clearer that sexually active teens are at great risk of being infected with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Some research has shown that, among those who are sexually active, teens have higher rates of many STDs than any other age group. This is probably because, compared com-pared to older people, teen-agers know less about how to reduce their risk of being infected. |