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CHICAGO (Reuters) - Birth and vain effort rates among U.S. teens fell to record lows in 2008 at the same time that increased use of contraceptives sent the overall teen pregnancy impost to its lowest level since at minutest 1972, a study showed on Wednesday.

But disparities mixed racial and ethnic groups continued to endure, with black and Hispanic teens experiencing pregnancy and miscarriage rates two to four times higher than their innocent peers, the Guttmacher Institute, the nonprofit sexual health research group that conducted the decomposition, said.

The Guttmacher researchers looked at command statistics on teen-age sex, pregnancies and births, of the same kind with well as the institute's confess data on abortions for 2008, the in the greatest degree recent year for which all the song were available.

They found that almost 750,000 U.S. women while suffering the age of 20 became gravid in 2008 -- nearly 98 percent of them between the ages of 15 and 19.

That translated into a pregnancy price of 67.8 pregnancies per 1,000 women having lived 15 to 19, the researchers declared, the lowest pregnancy rate seen subsequently to 1972, the year before the Supreme Court firmness in Roe v. Wade that established a woman's rectilinear to an abortion.

It was likewise down 42 percent from 1990, at the time that teen pregnancies peaked at 116.9 through 1,000 teen girls and women.

The teen vain effort rate in 2008 dropped to the lowest set a value on seen since 1972 at 17.8 by 1,000 teen girls and women, the analytics found, and was down 59 percent from 1988 whereas the abortion rate peaked at 43.5 through 1,000 teen women.

The Guttmacher researchers declared the decline in teen birthrates was largely attributable to increased contraceptive use by teens of both genders.

"Teens are also using greater degree effective forms of contraception," said Kathryn Kost, a demographer with the Guttmacher Institute who co-authored the parsing.

Among women aged 15 to 17, over a quarter of the long-~inus decline in pregnancies, births and abortions could be attributable to reduced sexual activity, the researchers reported.

But pregnancy, birth and abortion rates remained a great deal of higher for teens who belonged to pupilage groups, even though their overall rates receive fallen over the past four decades.

Birth rates with a view to black and Hispanic teens were greater amount of than twice those of their destitute of color peers in 2008, the researchers form in a mould. The abortion rate among black teens, meanwhile, was four state of things higher than the rate for their Caucasian counterparts. Abortion rates towards Hispanic teens were twice as admirable as for their white peers.

The Guttmacher study was funded with grants from The California Wellness Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

(Editing ~ dint of. Cynthia Johnston)

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