ThinkProgress notes that teen pregnancy has continued to go down, continuing a long-term trend. That’s a good thing, of course. But the states that require ignorance-only sex education (that’s a phrase I saw recently for abstinence-only, and I’m totally stealing it from now on) tend to have considerably higher rates than those who require comprehensive sex ed.
This is the lowest national rate for teen birthssince the Centers for Disease Control began tracking it in 1940, and CDC officials attributed the decline to pregnancy prevention efforts. Other reports show that teenagers are having less sex and using contraception more often. Studies have backed this up. Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle found that teenagers who received some type of comprehensive sex education were 60 percent less likely to get pregnant or get someone else pregnant. And in 2007, a federal report showed that abstinence-only programs had “no impacts on rates of sexual abstinence.”
Here are the ten states with the highest rates of teen births (births per 1000):
Mississippi (71)
Texas (69)
Arizona (67)
Arkansas (66)
New Mexico (66)
Georgia (63)
Louisiana (62)
Nevada (61)
Alabama (61)
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D. C. Sessions
April 15, 2012 at 10:21 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Somewhere I saw a set of longitudinal charts that showed the rates across time and the inflection where ignorance-only went into effect. Pretty damning.
slc1
April 15, 2012 at 10:25 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The purpose of ignorance only sex education is not to prevent unwanted pregnancies. The purpose is to punish those girls who don’t practice abstinence by allowing them to become pregnant.
Trebuchet
April 15, 2012 at 10:55 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The same policy toward drug abuse, “Just Say No”, didn’t work either. Churches have been preaching abstinence only for well over 1000 years. No go. Humans just like sex.
Michael Heath
April 15, 2012 at 11:03 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I would argue abortion to prevent an unplanned child is something to best be avoided by not getting pregnant in the first place. Therefore I think the more meaningful metric is looking at unplanned pregnancy rates or as a proxy, teen pregnancy rates, rather than teen birth rates.
Here are the ten highest states for teen pregnancy rates:
I’m not sure how they correlate to what level of sex education is offered.
Here are the states with the lowest rates in the last year report (2005):
I think what we discover when looking at these metrics is the role played not just by education, but also the proportion of people by socio-economic class where race and ethnicity is often an unfortunate yet still viable proxy. This aspect should commit states with more poor people to increase their commitment to public sex education, yet those very states are dominated by conservative Christians who are predominately and energetically in favor of ignorance as they are when it comes to all aspects of reality which challenges or falsifies their world view. However I do think we can’t ignore Utah’s relative success; that while they’re a relative outlier it’s possible for determined ignorance to win the day if other conditions exist.
Chiroptera
April 15, 2012 at 11:20 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
This is the lowest national rate for teen birthssince the Centers for Disease Control began tracking it in 1940….
What? That can’t be right. I thought that the ’40s and ’50s were supposed to be some sort of Judeao-Christian moral golden age?
Erp
April 15, 2012 at 11:35 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I should point out the top 10 rates are for 2000.
Birth rate in Mississippi for 2010 15-19 year old women was 55/1000 (a considerable drop from 71/1000 in 2000).
So rates are dropping even in states whose schools generally don’t provide full information. I wonder if access to the internet is giving teenagers access to information in other ways? It still isn’t as good as proper instruction (after all false information is also readily found on the internet) but might also help.
John Hinkle
April 15, 2012 at 11:49 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Damn facts.
I bet there’ll be a “la la la, can’t hear you” response from conservatards. Or maybe just plain crickets.
Scott Hanley
April 15, 2012 at 11:51 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Teen mothers were appropriately disgraced, so … yeah.
ehmm
April 15, 2012 at 11:59 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@5 Chiroptera
I was thinking the same thing, but remember that in the 1940′s it would have been quite common for a girl to be married at 15 or 16.
This further confirms for me that the abstinence-only crowd has their heads up their asses. They are pining away for a time when everybody just waited until after high school (18) or even college (20+) before they had sex. This “good ol’ days” never existed.
ehmm
April 15, 2012 at 12:15 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@8 Scott Hanley Also correct. The social stigma attached to being an unwed mother (not simply a teen mom) was harsh enough that if it happened, you did what you could to conceal it.
D. C. Sessions
April 15, 2012 at 12:28 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Notably, abortion. Any way necessary.
$HERSELF was working in Virginia hospitals before Roe v Wade and saw the consequences.
Modusoperandi
April 15, 2012 at 4:11 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Michael Heath “However I do think we can’t ignore Utah’s relative success; that while they’re a relative outlier it’s possible for determined ignorance to win the day if other conditions exist.”
Simple: No booze before and no cigarette after. Without ritual, sex is just something to do before the elevator doors open.
steve oberski
April 15, 2012 at 4:18 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
slc1 says:
Exactly.
You can see the same bronze age “morality” at work in the xtian opposition to HPV vaccinations for young girls.
Better that they die of cervical cancer than risk that they give young girls the message it “okay” to be sexually active.
Which of course is total bullshit. Many married, monogamous women acquire HPV from their husbands for whom the xtian religion does not seem to demand quite as high a standard of “purity” as they do of the women.
vmanis1
April 15, 2012 at 9:58 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I fail to understand the purpose of abstinence-only sex ed classes. Surely all that is necessary is to get the kids to chant `Just Don’t Get Horny’ several thousand times a day? How hard can that be?
At the risk of violating an unwritten Godwin-like law about the word `Orwellian’, I might mention that the Junior Anti-Sex League played an important role in Oceanan society.
JustaTech
April 16, 2012 at 2:16 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Here’s my concern about the “ignorance-only” sex ed, beyond teen pregnancy rates: What about after these kids get married. Let’s say that they’re “good” (or lucky) and don’t get pregnant until after they get married. Hello, married people still need birth control, or at least basic family planning, because I can’t imagine that most of them want a dozen kids. You’re not just dooming the ones who get pregnant in school to poverty, but, to a lesser extent, all the ones after, who haven’t had the time to build up the cash reserves or had enough job training to afford kids. It’s a vicious cycle all over.