The War on Pregnancy Takes a Hit

Holy Jimmyhats, Batman!

The nation's campaign to get more teenagers to delay sex and use condoms is faltering, threatening to undermine the highly successful effort to reduce teen pregnancy and protect young people from sexually transmitted diseases, federal officials reported today.

New data from a large government survey shows that by every measure, the decade-long decline in sexual activity among high school students leveled off between 2001 and 2007 and the rise in condom use by teens flattened out in 2003.

Moreover, the survey found disturbing hints that teen sexual activity may actually have begun creeping up and that condom use among high school students might be edging downward, though those trend lines have not yet reached a point where statisticians can be sure, officials said.

I can't say I'm surprised, considering most of these programs have been reduced to getting hump-happy teens and preteens to sign a paper saying, "I promise not to go 'boom-chicka-wah-wah' with someone I think is cute."

Anyway:

"The bottom line is in all these areas we don't seem to be making the progress we were making before," said Howell Wechsler, director of the division of adolescent and school health at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which conducts the survey. "It's very troubling."

I'd say, especially when you have the other end of the spectrum: the end where hardcore Bible-beating conservatives push for laws that allow strapping pregnant women to a table so they can't have an abortion.

Coming on the heels of reports that one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease and that the teen birth rate has increased for the first time in 15 years, the data is triggering alarm across the ideological spectrum.

"We have a number of signs that are all going exactly in the wrong direction," said Sarah S. Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. "All of us in this field are on red alert."

The new report did not examine the reason for the trends, but experts said there could be many causes, including rising complacency about AIDS, changing attitudes about sex and pregnancy, shifts in ethnic diversity and the possibility that there will always be some teens who cannot be convinced to wait.

Let's look at the theories, shall we?

1. "rising complacency about AIDS:" In other words, people don't give a damn about informing the youth about AIDS anymore, and the youth don't seem interested in asking about the consequences of unprotected sex. That's believable, if you accept the premise that the people behind this believe in abstinence as the best way to deter sexual activity. If you do, then mentioning AIDS is negligible (if they're abstinent, why mention it?)
2. "changing attitudes about sex and pregnancy:" In a country where little girls are encouraged to purchase plastic infants that are designed to eat, shit, and burp, how can young people not be confused about pregnancy? Other than the eternal debate of sex education (public school vs parents), that is.
3. "shifts in ethnic diversity:" I'm not going to say that this comes of as racist, I'm not...OK, screw it. It does sound racist. So what, because there's more brown people (pick a country) around, we've become more laissez-faire as a nation?
4. "there will always be some teens who cannot be convinced to wait:" Well, duh. But that doesn't explain the "I don't wanna wear a condom anymore" crowd.

It appears to that the War on Teen Pregnancy, like the War on Drugs before it, fell apart do to lip service and half-ass tactics. To blame it on different ethnic groups, young people not caring, or "Knocked Up" playing in theatres in on cable is just a cop-out.

When you make a action plan to address a problem, you're supposed to review the results in order to determine it's effectiveness. If it works, keep doing it and keep reviewing the results until it stops having an effect, then try something else. What you don't do is put your plan on auto-pilot and hope for the best.