by Richard T. Cooper

About the author: Richard T. Cooper is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times.

Scholar Joseph Hotz says teenagers do not have problems because they have babies; they have babies because they have problems. Instead of targeting teen pregnancy, society should address such causes as poverty and abuse of girls, he says.

Traditional Efforts to Fight Teen Pregnancy

With a fanfare of support from the White House and Capitol Hill, a coalition of liberals and conservatives called the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy launched a crusade in May 1997. Its goals: to increase awareness of the devastating problems faced by adolescent mothers and to cut the teen pregnancy rate one-third by 2005.

Americans, the group declared, “see teen pregnancy as a powerful marker of a society gone astray&mdash...