This makes sense. Higher birth rate, but NOT higher abortion rate—states with more Christians probably don’t have as many abortion.
Does not necessarily mean conception rate.
Here’s their methodology :
Strayhorn compiled data from various data sets. 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, while 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.”
They found a strong correlation between statewide conservative religiousness and statewide teen birth rate even when they accounted for income and abortion rates.
Exactly. Let’s compare the abortion rates before we conjecture any further. Also...lets throw in the STD rates, too!