Washington University is reaching out to the St. Louis community to tackle teen pregnancy, an issue virtually absent on campus but prevalent in Missouri.

The University is starting the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative, a five-year educational program in the St. Louis region designed to educate teens currently in foster care about safe sex; including pregnancy prevention, contraception and prevention of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). The program will target approximately 600 teenage girls still in or “aging out” of foster care.

Almost half of the girls in Missouri’s foster care system are pregnant or give birth before age 19. They are faced with the responsibility of raising a child, a responsiblity that most of them aren’t equipped to handle.

Eighty percent of all teen mothers will not keep a romantic connection with their baby’s father, and 66 percent of Missouri children living under the poverty level are in single-parent homes. The majority of these mothers and their children will live underprivileged lives.

Dr. Katie Plax of St. Louis Children’s Hospital heads the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative, and she believes that these numbers can change. Plax is an adolescent medicine specialist and medical director of a drop-in teen health center located at the Washington University Health Center called the SPOT (Supporting Positive Opportunities with Teens).

Also involved with the project is Research Administrator Kimberly Donica, who heads Project ARK (AIDS Resources and Knowledge), which provides medical, supportive and preventative services for women and children with HIV in the St. Louis area.

“We see a number of youth at the SPOT and in the Adolescent Center who have been in foster care,” Plax said. “We think they deserve special attention from health professionals and others and are an underserved population of youth.”

Plax’s work at the center prompted her colleagues and her to look further into the research about teen pregnancy rates for foster kids in St. Louis. What they found was startling: Almost one in five are pregnant by the age of 17 and 53 percent are pregnant by the age of 19.

The program will therefore target girls between the ages of 13 and 17 in foster care to educate them about their sexual health and how to prevent themselves from becoming a statistic. The initiative will follow an evidence-based prevention intervention model called “Safer Sex.”

“It is a three-part intervention utilizing media, group discussion and follow-up interviews,” Plax said.

The SPOT will act as headquarters for the initiative, where the pregnancy prevention services will be offered.

“We thought the SPOT could be comfortable place for them to be served, and we also have a structure in place for youth to partner with us for their health and well being,” Plax said.

The young women participating will also have the opportunity to be involved in a research study being conducted in the School of Medicine’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. The Contraceptive CHOICE Project, according to director Gina Secura, aims to reduce unintended pregnancy and teen pregnancy in the St. Louis Region.

With $400,000 from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the program directors hope to accomplish their goal of helping to prevent teen pregnancies in the area and provide a more promising life for these young girls.

The Centers for Disease Control  and Prevention reports that one-third of all women in the United States will be pregnant before the age of 20, but projects like this carry the hope of lowering that statistic.