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.
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