Bush policies likely to blame for more teen births [Cynthia Tucker alert]

After declining for more than a decade, births to unmarried teenagers suddenly increased 3 percent among 15- to 19-year-old girls between 2005 and 2006, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Like the uptick in violent crime, this could signal a worrisome trend —- another sign that undesirable social phenomena the nation struggled to curb in the 1990s have begun to ooze back up through the sewer grate. The one-year increase in births to teen moms could be an anomaly. Maybe the numbers for 2007 will show another decline, as adolescent girls stick to their abstinence pledges or remember to use contraceptives. Maybe the 3 percent increase is just a slight bump in the long road toward ending adolescent motherhood.

But the figures are troubling because they come after years of national folly, including a White House strategy of endorsing and funding abstinence-only education. President Bush and other social conservatives have long rejected giving adolescents information about contraception while also encouraging abstinence. They insist that teaching kids to rely on chastity will prevent sexual experimentation.

That never made much sense, given a culture that uses sex to sell everything from toothpaste to T-shirts. Adolescents are hardly immune to those continuous cultural signals, pumped through music, videos and youth-oriented TV shows such as Fox's long-running drama, "The O.C." Over the last couple of years, a raft of studies has given scientific weight to the nagging suspicion that "abstinence only" education is a dud.

In 2005 and 2006, researchers surveyed 2,000 teenagers in two rural and two urban communities. They found that students who had had abstinence-only education were just as likely to have sex as a control group of teens who did not receive the instruction. Among sexually active teens in both groups, the average age of the start of sexual activity was just shy of 15. A majority of those had two or more partners, they said. Just 23 percent reported always using condoms.

The recent rise in teen births stands in stark contrast to more than a decade of decline. Between 1991 and 2005, the rate of births to females aged 15-19 plummeted by 34 percent, from a high of 61.8 births per 1,000 in 1991 to 40.5 live births per 1,000 females in that age bracket in 2005.

And that stunning drop was by no means mere coincidence. Activists and community volunteers who genuinely wanted to curb adolescent pregnancy —- as opposed to those who just wanted to rail against abortion and inflict their rigid moral codes on others —- worked hard to find programs that actually worked. They formed clubs for teen girls. They wrote scripts for role-playing, teaching teenagers how to say "no" to sex. (Those activists, too, believe in abstinence, but they're not naive about its utility.)

High school teachers assigned homework in which students spent a week caring for crying, fidgeting, diaper-wetting baby dolls, so adolescents would learn how difficult and demanding infants can be. They handed out contraceptives, including Depo-Provera, an injection that proved effective with teenaged girls who were unlikely to remember daily pills.

Through the 1990s, that overlapping network of programs was supported and partially funded by the Clinton White House, which believed in a pragmatic response to social problems. While President Clinton supported a woman's right to choose, he also said abortions should be "safe, legal and rare." The same pragmatism brought federal support for crime prevention efforts, including federal funds for hiring police officers.

By contrast, the Bush White House has turned back to a conservative ideology that mocks government as the source of problems —- unless taxpayer funds can be used to further far-right objectives. So Depo-Provera is out, but abstinence pledges are in.

Maybe it's just coincidence that more adolescent girls are having babies. More likely, it's the inevitable result of a raft of foolish policies.

> Cynthia Tucker is the editorial page editor. Her column appears Wednesdays and Sundays.

Cynthia Tucker is really an incredible woman. She’s written literally thousands of columns over decades of being a journalist, and over all those columns has somehow managed a perfect record - she has never been right one single time in her entire life. You can make investment decisions based on the inevitable truth of the opposite of whatever she writes. In fact, the absolute best thing the global warming cultists could do for their cause would be to convince Cynthia Tucker that there is no global warming and have her write a column making that point; no surer proof for global warming could possibly exist.

It takes a special kind of talent to be that dumb.

Hey Cynthia you b*tch drop dead. It’s up to parents to put the fear of God into their teenagers and that would solve the problem. When you have a whole segment of society becoming grandmothers by the age of thirty you should probably start considering sterilization.

Oh my goodness, this article is (or rather, should be) embarassing for the author. Her lack of understanding of even the most basic fundamentals of social science and statistics is breathtaking.

I don’t know about this article. Right now, I’m a researcher for a doctor who is writing a book about politically correct sex education (her name is Dr. Grossman; she wrote the fabulous book “Unprotected.”) It seems that the most effective way to curb teen pregnancy is to isolate high-risk girls (usually those from low-income families who do poorly in school) and encourage them to aspire to more in life than unwed motherhood and view having sex as a self-respect issue. When girls are taught to respect themselves and have goals in life (as opposed to “have sex when you’re ready and use condoms,” which is what liberals want), they are much less likely to get pregnant.

Oh, and they usually don’t get pregnant because they choose abstinence. Condoms have little to do with it. Girls who feel like unwed motherhood is the best they’ll ever get from life don’t care if they get pregnant.

And, schools that refuse to teach Judeo-Christian values and instead teach liberal nostrums as FACTS. Parents from the ‘60’s are numbskulls usually and think that their progeny are good blank slates for the old Jane Fonda-Tom Hayden-Dr. Spock mentality. With that and their love for socialism and pacifism which is also taught in schools, kids are inundated with propaganda.

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