After decline, teenage pregnancy rate rises – Thanks, George
Bristol Palin, poster child for abstinence-only results
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission
After more than a decade of declining teenage pregnancy, the pregnancy rate among girls ages 15 to 19 increased 3 percent from 2005 to 2006 — a turnaround likely to intensify the debate over federal financing for abstinence-only sex education.
The teenage abortion rate also crept up for the first time in more than a decade, rising 1 percent from 2005 to 2006, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit research group…
While teenage pregnancy rates for whites remain far lower than for Blacks and Hispanics, the pregnancy rates increased for all three groups…
The Guttmacher analysis examined federal data on teenage sex, births and abortion, along with the institute’s own abortion statistics…
“This new study makes it crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work,” said Cecile Richards, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
The Clinton administration began financing abstinence-only programs as part of welfare reform, but such programs got a large boost in the Bush administration.
The Obama administration has moved away from abstinence-only programs, creating a new teenage-pregnancy initiative in which most financing will go to programs that have been shown to prevent pregnancy, with some experimental approaches…
There are continuing efforts to reinstate financing for abstinence-only education as part of the health-reform legislation.
A definition of insanity includes repeating something over and over and expecting a different result.
Rightwing ideologues who place blind obedience to religion, 19th Century educational standards, over knowledge and science aren’t going to change the retrograde guidance of their politics. Results are meaningless to True Believers.
Hopefully, a majority of this ill-educated nation will eventually come to an age of reason.
