Here’s a unique scholarship money idea: earning cash for your empty womb! A program at University of North Carolina at Greenboro called College Bound Sisters,  started by two doctorate-holding nurses, has paid teen girls one dollar per day for college if they don’t get pregnant.

Oh my God, look! Models—not celebrities—on the cover of a fashion magazine! And they’re black! November’s Teen Vogue published a fantastic cover story about models Chanel Iman and Jourdan Dunn, who spoke candidly about the racism in the modeling industry and the competition that results when black models feel there can only be “one black girl.” (Chanel is actually black and Korean—damn, she should have been in our biracial hotties slideshow!) The pair dished to Teen Vogue about the fashion industry’s flat-out racism:

Iman: “You’re being told, ‘So and so is only booking one black girl. It’s either you or Jourdan,’ So we’ll be sitting in the lobby looking at each other like, ‘Okay, I want this job, and she wants it too. Which one of us is going to get it?’”

Dunn: “I remember last season, I was about to go into a casting, and my agent phoned and said, ‘Turn back. They decided they don’t want any black models.’ I was like, ‘They’re actually telling you that’s the reason? Are you serious?!’”

At Port Chester High School in New York, officials have signed off on a new service that has lots of folks up in arms. They’ll now be offering free STD and pregnancy testing to any student who asks ... without parental consent or notification. While many people are squirming in their seats thinking about the moral and religious implications of this decision, I gotta say woo hoo! Here’s why.

Last night on the season finale of “16 & Pregnant,” Dr. Drew interviewed all six of the teens who gave birth in the show’s first season (it has been picked up for a second). Five out of the six girls ended up keeping their babies to raise, but it was the girl who gave her daughter up for adoption that had the biggest impact on viewers and Dr. Drew. Catelynn (along with her boyfriend/step-brother Tyler) showed an unbelievable amount of strength and maturity in making her decision to put little Carly up for adoption, emphasizing both before giving birth, after labor, and then again on the reunion that concentrating on what was best for Carly – not her own selfish desires – gave her the strength she need to see her decision through.

“16 And Pregnant”: it’s not just an MTV reality show, it’s also America’s scary reality! A Centers for Disease Control report just came out which discovered teen pregnancy increased in recent years. Teen birth rates rose during 2006 and 2007, after having decreased from 1991 to 2005.

More scary news is the number of AIDS cases in young men. CDC data shows that between 1997 and 2006, the number of men ages 15 to 24 with AIDS increased, as well. [ABC News]

MTV‘s “16 and Pregnant” was a hot mess last night. Catelynn and Tyler are really sweet, smart, loving, mature kids who want the best for their baby, but their mom and pops are pretty screwed up. Mom is a drunk driver; Tyler’s dad is an ex-con. And, their parents are married. Yeah, Catelynn and Tyler are boyfriend and girlfriend, soon-to-be teen parents—and step-siblings. Wait, is this “Jerry Springer”?

Watch the kids tell their parents their choice is to give their daughter up for adoption because they both want to go to college—and how their parents try to convince them to raise their baby in this bats**t family instead. [MTV]

• Rihanna supposedly wants Chris Brown’s restraining order lifted so the two can “work on their friendship.” [Your Tango]—Rihanna’s dad doesn’t approve, and neither do we. [I’m not surprised at all by this.—Annika]
• Em & Lo want to know—do you have good playdar? [Em & Lo]
• North Carolina schools are now paying teenage girls, to not get pregnant. The going rate is $365 a year, or $1 a day.[Lemon Drop]—Not sure if this is the best route to pregnancy-free teens, as I’d take sex over a dollar any day.

Last night, MTV premiered its new reality show “16 And Pregnant.” And the Juno from the premiere, Miss Maci from Chattanooga, was like a Babyzilla pounding her fists for attention and whining to her BF and the cameras non-stop. Good thing MTV was there to validate the importance of her feelings!

Bristol Palin and OctoMom take note! The UK’s National Health Service is using scare tactics to prevent teen pregnancy. This public service announcement doesn’t make a ton of sense, but it’s disturbing. Screaming children run across a playground, crowd around one girl, and suddenly a baby’s head pops out from between her legs. The camera is “Blair Witch Project” shaky. Now we feel nauseous, thanks to the shaking and the bloody head.  [TresSugar]

When Bristol Palin got knocked up at age 17, she made national headlines. We applauded her for realizing that “everyone should be abstinent or whatever but it’s not realistic at all,” and we were hopeful (for three seconds) that she would turn this unfortunate situation into a positive one by promoting safe sex. But when she said seconds later that “you should just wait ten years,” we got on her case. The girl is a walking contradiction. And it hasn’t stopped there.

Bristol Palin appeared on “The Today Show” and “Good Morning America” today because it’s the National Day to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, and Palin has signed on to be a national spokeswoman for the Candie’s Foundation. We watched the interviews, and they were equally awkward. On “Today,” Bristol appeared with baby Tripp and her father, Todd. Mostly, she talked about how much work being a mother is, and how it’s a full-time job. While she didn’t practice abstinence, she wants other young women to know how hard it is to be a mother. As for Levi Johnston, Bristol said she wasn’t on “Today” to talk about her personal life, but after an uncomfortable silence and some questioning by Matt Lauer, she said Levi is a part of Tripp’s life, although she wouldn’t say to what extent. The interview unraveled at the end when Todd said, “Sharing Bristol’s experience with other teenagers, the mistake she had here over a year ago, if she could prevent one teenager from getting pregnant, that would be great.” Oops. Todd called Tripp a mistake. 

Actually, Todd seemed less media-savvy than Bristol, which might be why he didn’t accompany Bristol for her “Good Morning America” interview. In addition to doing a one-on-one interview with Chris Cuomo, she appeared with Neil Cole from the Candie’s Foundation. “Just because you’re wearing high-heeled sexy shoes doesn’t mean you should have a baby,” he said. Oooh. Compelling.

Teenage mothers are at a greater risk of becoming obese than other women their age who don’t get pregnant, according to a new study by health care provider Kaiser Permanente. “Our findings are potentially important because adolescence has been identified as one of the critical periods of development that set the stage for the onset of obesity later in life,” wrote researchers in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. Their findings show that pregnancy boosts obesity risks for adult women, and that adolescent pregnancy may have a greater influence on the body weight and fat accumulations of teens.

President Barack Obama has been in office for more than 50 days, but the impact of the previous eight years is still leaving an impression. According to a new report from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, 2007 marked the second straight year teen birth rates rose in the U.S. The first year, 2006, ended a 14 year decline. More than 70 percent of Black babies and 51.3 percent of Hispanic babies were born to unmarried women in 2007 and the teen birth rate increased by five percent between 2005 and 2007. Some experts are blaming the increase on the Bush administration’s “abstinence-only” education policy.

Teenage pregnancy is trendier than metrosexual manscaping.  From celebs like Jamie Lynn Spears to preggers Bristol Palin, the 17-year-old daughter of the Republican VP hopeful, baby bumps on babies are popping up in the most conspicuous places. In the current climate where children are exposed to sexuality through pop culture, Planned Parenthood is more needed than ever.  Yet despite their efforts, they’ve come under fire from conservative groups for their recent campaign, Take Care Down There.  We posted some love for these cheeky PSA’s back in April when the site launched, but after a cross-country summer tour, the safe-sex advocates have been getting crap for their sense of humor.  Planned Parenthood has said they are trying to appeal to their young audience through relatable slang and situations without confusing their messages with fear mongering and scientific lingo.  However, conservative groups are claiming Planned Parenthood isn’t taking the situation seriously by supporting safe-sex and masturbation via comedy sketches that the abstinence-only supported find hokey. But petty arguments aside, with one in four teenage girls already infected with an STD and teen pregnancy on the rise for the first time in almost 15 years, something has got to be done…besides all those teenagers. [ABC News]

The possible pregnancy pact story continues! One of the pregnant teens, 17-year-old Lindsey Oliver, told Good Morning America there was, in fact, no pact, just as reader Go-To-Girl suspected. “No. There was definitely no pact. There was a group of girls who decided that they were gonna ... they were already pregnant before they decided this. That they were gonna help each other with their kids so they could finish school and raise their kids together, to do the right thing was their decision. Not, let’s get pregnant, like, as a group,” she said. Her boyfriend said she was on birth control, and they weren’t planning on getting pregnant. It’s interesting to hear his perspective. Andrew Psalidas is 20 and goes to community college. “It was definitely hard to begin with,” Andrew said. “Now, we have to deal with everybody knowing that she is having a baby ... now it’s like, she’s ‘one of those Gloucester girls having a baby,’ so it’s like we’re doing something wrong when we’re trying to do everything we can to make it right for the mistake that we made.” He actually sounds really mature and makes a good point. [TheBostonChannel.com]

So, remember that teen pregnancy pact story we wrote about yesterday that was featured in Time? Well, one of our frequent commenters, Go-To-Girl, pointed us to a blog post she wrote where she theorizes that the pact story is actually a bit of a scam. After doing some serious number crunching and some nosing around the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy’s statistic, Go-To-Girl figured out that the percentage of teen pregnancies that the school reflects is actually lower than the lowest state pregnancy rate in the nation (North Dakota)—which she says blows a hole in the “pregnancy outbreak” story hook. Additionally, the pact aspect is also in question according to Go-To-Girl’s research. More info, after the jump… 

Most sexually active teen girls probably live in fear of the day they miss their period, but a group of high schoolers in Massachusetts all decided to get pregnant and raise their babies together—17 of them succeed, and one was even knocked up by a 24-year-old homeless man, according to Gloucester High School’s principal, Joseph Sullivan. Normally there are about four pregnancies at this school of 1,200, which is located in a largely Catholic community. When girls came multiple times to the school clinic for pregnancy tests and seemed more upset if they weren’t pregnant than if they were, the school started asking questions. A girl in the class above the pregnancy pactmakers said she thinks they wanted to have babies because of the unconditional love they believed would come with having a child. “I try to explain it’s hard to feel loved when an infant is screaming to be fed at 3 a.m.,” she said. We smell a Lifetime movie coming out of this. [Time]