I read about it in the morning Post and Ygelsias picked up on the story as well. He links to Lawyers, Guns and Money that highlights the key paragraph.
"[T]eenage sex rates have risen since 2001 and condom use has dropped since 2003. Abortion rates have held steady for a decade, although numbers from 2005 and 2006 are not available."
So abstinence only education has been shown to have no real affect whatsoever. As I previously discussed, I’m not sure there’s strong evidence that sex-ed programs work but there is definite support for making methods of contraception freely available. The dependent variable in the studies are often abortions, but I’d suspect the abortion rate is somewhat correlated with the unintended pregnancy rate (aside from those abortions resulting from health reasons).
The one other question of interest to me is how many of these are unintended pregnancies. I’ve heard some arguments that in certain communities young motherhood can be a bit of a norm. Dealing with that problem is really a separate issue entirely.
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