Jeanna Bryner - LiveScience.com: The Most Popular Myths in Science
Posted on 09/17/2009 9:55:54 AM PDT 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.
The relationship could be due to the fact that communities with such religious beliefs (a literal interpretation of the Bible, for instance) may frown upon contraception, researchers say. If that same culture isn't successfully discouraging teen sex, the pregnancy and birth rates rise.
Mississippi topped the list for conservative religious beliefs and teen birth rates, according to the study results, which will be detailed in a forthcoming issue of the journal Reproductive Health.
However, the results don't say anything about cause and effect, though study researcher Joseph Strayhorn of Drexel University College of Medicine and University of Pittsburgh offers a speculation of the most probable explanation: "We conjecture that religious communities in the U.S. are more successful in discouraging the use of contraception among their teenagers than they are in discouraging sexual intercourse itself."
The study comes with other significant caveats, too:
The same link might not be found for other types of religious beliefs that are perhaps more liberal, researchers say. And while the study reveals information about states as a whole, it doesn't shed light on whether an individual teen who is more religious will also be more likely to have a child.
"You can't talk about individuals, because you don't know what's producing the [teen birth] rate," said Amy Adamczyk, a sociologist at the City University of New York, who was not involved in the current study. "Are there just a couple of really precocious religious teenagers who are running around and getting pregnant and having all of these babies, but that's not the norm?"
Strayhorn agrees and says the study aimed to look at communities (or states) as a whole.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
It is more of a racism alert, Mississippi (#1) is 37% black.
New Mexico (#2) is only 42% white
Utah (#34)is 1% black.
New Hampshire (#51) is 1% black.
I know that's what the Freudians used to love to say. But everyone knows the consequences. Religious people's kids rebel, as all teenagers do to some extent, but as a group (in my observation), their scale of rebellion is 10 on the scale of 100. The children of atheists living on Central Park West in NYC filling out the "100" end of the scale with drugs, sex changes, and suicides.
“In most religious states” do not equate to “most religious teens”. People seem to conveniently forget that even the most religious states have some very irreligious cities in them. If I remember correctly Texas was in the top ten most religious states, but Austin is not only not particularly religious—it is the headquarters of the American atheists. What true journalists would do is to try to determine how religious the knocked up teenagers are, not how religious their neighbors might be. But then we have many more journwhoralists than we have journalists these days.
To a liberal - Abortion is a very good form of contraception.
This is a wonderful example of a meaningless correlation. To have any significance, we would need to know the birth/abortion rates for those people within each state who are defined as "religious" according the Pew Survey. We also need to know the ages of the teens and their marital status when they gave birth. No rational conclusion can be made from the correlation without this additional information.
They may have loose conservative religous beliefs but they are liberal dependents who vote for the Dem’s.
That’s what I was wondering -
the implication is “unmarried”, but this is never stated.
The “teenage” marriage rate is probably higher among religious conservatives as well.
I read through all the comments and didnt see anyone suggest that perhaps Christians just want to have more kids. There are families in my church with 6, 7, 8 and 9 children - on purpose! They love kids!
My mother was 18 when she had me. She had been married to my father for 2 years at the time. They stayed together until his death two years ago. Teen pregnancy in and of itself is not a bad thing. Single women getting pregnant, teens or not, is a whole different thing, imo.
Still, you have to admit that it’s curious when states with reported higher rates of religious observance have higher pregnancy rates.
I’m suspicious of anything that belies the autonomy of hte individual. As my father used to say, we all live in our own heads.
Exactly. Let’s compare the abortion rates before we conjecture any further. Also...lets throw in the STD rates, too!
You will find a much tighter tie between illegal immigration and teen births than with religious devotion in America.
The Religious/Red states are the ones with population growth...and new housing construction that draws illegal labor to build it.
See:
http://www.vdare.com/thom/090226_immigration.htm
The idea that “we all live in our own heads” is a fallacy of Cartesian, Enlightenment thinking. It denies the intrinsic social nature of mankind as taught by the Church that serves as the cornerstone of Western civilization.
No, it’s a truism. You experience nothing, absolutely nothing outside of yourself.
Jeanna Bryner - LiveScience.com: The Most Popular Myths in Science
Keeping rather than aborting and marrying young. A nineteen year old married woman is a teen
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