Posted on 09/17/2009 7:28:47 AM PDT by xzins
A new study is suggesting a “strong” link between the religiosity of a state’s residents and the teen birth rate there.
Though only half of the states listed among the ten most conservatively religious also appear in the list of ten states with the highest teen birth rates, researchers behind the latest study say increased religiosity in residents of states in the U.S. strongly predicted a higher teen birth rate.
“With data aggregated at the state level, conservative religious beliefs strongly predict U.S. teen birth rates, in a relationship that does not appear to be the result of confounding by income or abortion rates,” researchers reported in the summary for their report, “Religiosity and Teen Birth Rates,” which was published Thursday in the Reproductive Health journal.
“One possible explanation for this relationship is that teens in more religious communities may be less likely to use contraception,” the researchers added.
For the study, Joseph Strayhorn of Drexel University College of Medicine and University of Pittsburgh compiled publicly accessible data on birth rates, conservative religious beliefs, income, and abortion rates in the U.S., aggregated at the state level. While the religiosity information came from a sample of nearly 36,000 participants who were part of the U.S. Religious Landscapes Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life conducted in 2007, the teen birth and abortion statistics came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For religiosity, the researchers averaged the percentage of respondents who agreed with conservative responses to eight statements, including: ''There is only one way to interpret the teachings of my religion," and ''Scripture should be taken literally, word for word."
“At the state level in the U.S., religiosity, as operationally defined by the eight questions of the Pew Survey, accurately predicts a high teen birth rate,” the researchers wrote in their report.
“[T]he magnitude of the correlation between religiosity and teen birth rate astonished us,” they added.
But the researchers cautioned against inferring from their results that “Religious teens get pregnant more often.”
“It would be a statistical and logical error” to do so, they stated. “Such an inference would be an example of the ecological fallacy.”
Instead, the researchers speculated that conservative religious communities in the U.S. are more successful in discouraging use of contraception among their teen community members than in discouraging sexual intercourse itself.
Notably, while researchers found a positive correlation between religiosity and teen birth rates, they also found that abortion rates correlated negatively with religiosity
The good news: less likely to go after an abortion
The bad news: having sex (obviously) at higher rates.
Suggests to me that our pro-life/anti-contraceptive message is getting through, but that the culture is actually the strongest influence on sexual behavior.
The captain obvious graphic getting a workout today.
Another factor is that many Christian families do encourage marriage and family rather than pushing a career and other things for young women. It is wrong-headed to be worried about “teen pregnancy” if the teen is a happily married, well prepared and well-adjusted 18 or 19 year old young lady. I don’t think the authors of this report and research get that.
I highly doubt there is a causal relationship here.
It’s true that they’re having more abortions, but it also means sex among religious teens is at the same or higher rate.
Abstinence is not catching on. It is in only a small part of the teen’s culture, whereas open sexuality is in 99% of what they see on a daily basis.
I heard of another recent survey which found that blacks were more likely to be Biblical literalists. Also, the region highest in the kind of religiosity considered in the linked study would probably be the South, which has a high black population, and blacks have a higher rate of teen pregnancy.
That is one poorly written mess of an article.
You think religious teens having a higher teen birth rate is obvious???
I would be among those who’d want to predict that it would be lower due to different sexual values.
The good news is that girls who are religious are not killing their babies. Now if they bring up their children in the faith, this is a plus for the future. The churches have a big responsibility here, building Christian families instead of bigger buildings.
Birth rate excludes abortions, so naturally religious girls would have a higher “birth rate”.
It will never catch on. We were designed to marry in our teens. We come into sexual maturity in our teens for a reason. It is only the last 50 years of our culture that we have denied our purpose for life; to marry and procreate.
None of this will change until society gets back to teaching their children to become adults, not encouraging them to just be big children.
My son is getting married in Jan. He is 22, his fiance is 20. They waited for 1 year after getting engaged, they were engaged 8 months after they met. They are fully formed adults, not children, if parents did their jobs right. I often point out that God, who created us and knows us better than anyone else, overshadowed Mary at 14, and she gave birth at 15 to Jesus. If that is not a God ordained mandate as to the readiness of a teenager to handle all that God ordained, than I don’t know what is.
It is a 100 percent lack of good parenting and moral upringing that has wrought us with these issues. Teens are MORE THAN equal to the task if raised properly........
For the record, I was a teenage wife and mother.......
Ty ecom, I didn’t see the post prior to posting my own. They are not measuring pregnancy rates, only birth rates here.
This article doesn't distinguish between married and non-married teens, but I'm assuming that the non-married teen rate is what's high.
That is probably true, since most folks don’t have shotgun weddings anymore.
While I agree with the point about sexual maturity being at an early age, I'd point out that the above italicized comment is speculation. There is nothing that gives Mary's age. In fact, her cousin, Elizabeth, is portrayed as old. Cousins can certainly have wide age disparities, but using that, I could say, circumstantially, that Mary was older. (Which also wouldn't be good scholarship.)
To repeat though, I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment of sexual maturity and adulthood.
The lesson to me is that our teens are too influenced by the culture.
We should be bringing up our teens to understand that a family is both a father and a mother, and that fathers are indispensible in the raising of children.
So, it’s good that young girls are not so shamed that they are killing their babies, but we’ve got to regroup and look for a way to emphasize a public commitment between young men and their women prior to pregnancies happening.
The following items should be noted to completely deflate the snide implications this “study” is trying to promote:
1). “Teen” means anyone between the ages of 13 and 19 inclusive. Since many religious girls tend to marry young, it is not unlikely that married teens in more religious states are also higher. Which leads to note number two:
2).Nothing in this propaganda says that the teens getting pregnant are unmarried. A married 19-year-old having a baby doesn’t ring alarm bells in my head.
Nice try though. To the uncritical eye, these lies would serve to cast doubt on religious principles, which is exactly what it’s trying to do. Lies, damned lies, and the slyly omitted details.
Are those married teens or unmarried? HUGE difference, and the article is meaningless without it.
Take it from the study of the culture from that time period. What age was the norm for marriage then, and extrapolate the data from there. Points to under 16. Jews have always considered 13 the age of maturity, still do.
As to Mary’s exact age, there is, of course, some speculation, but I am fairly certain there is some source of this information that is at least widely accepted in most scholarly circles. As a Catholic, I have the backing of the Church on these ages as being reasonable, and that is where I leave it, I need nothing further personally.
The point remains we ended at the same station, even though we took different trains to get there. Logic dictates the fact to be relevant and thats what really matters ;)
I’m no so sure, Jack. I think that we’ve still got too high a teen birth rate even when early marriages are controlled for.
I don’t want to bash Christians. I am one. And a pastor.
I’d rather admit that we’ve got work to do in protecting our young girls from cultural messages about sexual availability.
Not necessarily. Non religious teens may use birth control at a higher rate.
the culture is actually the strongest influence on sexual behavior.
I think the raging hormones are the leading factor and the non judgmental culture the second strongest influence.
I may have missed it, but I didn’t see anything here breaking out UNmarried teens from married ones. And yes, if one wants to know about teen pregnancies, rather than births, one needs to know the number of abortions - something I would assume is hard to ascertain with certainty.
Not surprising being Black and Hispanics who have the highest teen in and out of wedlock birth rates are also the most religious
I don’t see why there would be an assumption that non-religious teens would use birth control more than religious teens. The vast majority of Christian sub-groups have no moral objections to birth control use. Even in the the sub-groups that teach that birth control use is wrong, the practice of members largely fails to match up to the doctrine.
This speculation, of course, is offered independently of accepting the contentions of the article. I do not find their statistical methods adequately rigorous to make their data persuasive.
Exactly! The libs expect us to be sorry that young women get pregnant.
We’re not sorry.
I don’t know if this is a factor or not in this particular study, but when they talk about the Bible Belt and the number of teenage pregnancies, they fail to mention the racial aspect. If you were to break teen pregnancy down between whites and blacks, the problem would become very clear. Within the black community nearly 85% of live births are from single mothers. That’s a fact. The issue has less to do with religious beliefs and more to do with race.
Having sex at higher rates is not neccesarily wrong. After all, the survey doesnt check how many of the teens were married when they got pregnant. And eighteen and nineteen year-olds are still teenagers, and can be legally married.
Not so. These things are functions of cultural fashion. In the Seventeenth Century is was unusual to marry before you were thirty.
http://www.reproductive-health-journal.com/content/pdf/1742-4755-6-14.pdf
The above is a link to the actual study
There’s a question in their 8 question “religiosity” scale that I don’t like:
8) How often do you receive a definite answer to a specific prayer request:
The correct answer or more to be “religious” is: at least once a month.
I’m sitting here thinking that a very religious person would be the OPPOSITE of that. They wouldn’t expect a definite answer to a specific prayer request at some quick rate.
That sounds like “fantasy religiosity” more than it sounds like deep religiosity.
The culture is beyond “nonjudgmental.” I call it “encouraging” of teen sexual acting out.
On reflection I would have to agree.
See #31 for a link to the actual study
I guess it depends on how you phrase your prayer requests and what you consider a "definite answer." Is "Oh, don't be silly!" a definite answer?
Is, "God, please help me get through everything on the calendar for the next three days, without killing anyone!" a specific request, and does the arrival of the weekend with no deaths count as a "definite answer"?
With just a quick look at the PDF, I got a red flag in the first sentence, when they mentioned bad outcomes for children of “teen mothers” rather than “unmarried mothers.” I’ve never seen any data comparing outcomes for children born to married-and-stayed-married mothers when the mothers were under 20, with outcomes for children born to married-and-stayed-married mothers when the mothers were 20 and older.
It’s also interesting that the “religiosity” questions didn’t include anything about whether the person’s specific behavioral choices were guided by the moral teachings of her religious faith. That rather fits with the researchers’ choice of the term “religiosity,” which is not, in spite of popular usage, synonymous with serious religious faith.
Outstanding observation.
I'd say so!
Yep - I worked with someone who wore a three-inch cross around his neck every single day and expressed no need to marry the mother of his child, either before or after delivery.
Kennedys, for example. Mel Gibson. Devotions may be enacted, and sincere professions of belief in God made (even the demons believe, and tremble ...), but some people seem to have a complete disconnect between what they say they believe, and what they do.
I think so, too, so I’d have answered the question about prayers being answered affirmatively. I see xzins’ point, too, though.
I don’t expect an immediate answer to Big Prayers (see home page), but little bitsy ones (St. Anthony, where’s my phone charger?) get answered pretty much on a daily basis.
Oh, I’m so sorry. I’ll pray for both of you and all your friends and petz!
St. Anthony help me find my dad’s truck keys once. These days, I’m more likely to say, “There’s a prize for the person who finds my (phone charger, piano cord, shoes, car keys).”
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Sounds like a fair summary of the situation.
Thanks for the prayers.
I tried offering the cats a reward for finding my real wallet after the rally last weekend (the last remaining can of wet cat food) but there were no takers. Fortunately that bag was still in the car.
Posted on Thursday, September 17, 2009 11:55:54 AM by SeekAndFind
U.S. states whose residents have more conservative religious beliefs on average tend to have higher rates of teenagers giving birth, a new study suggests.
_______________________________________
No media bias here is there?
/sarc
My cat finds things *if* they happened to be lost in the lounge chair or the baby’s bed.
Did you have fun at the rally?
Oh yes, it was the bomb. I knew probably 100 people at it and could not find ANY of them, but there were a million others to talk to. I came home completely wrecked. I opened a can of beer, set it on the coffee table, and watched it get hot because it was too far to reach and too heavy to lift.
LOL! Sounds like the definition of a great time!
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