Yahoo: Pregnancies among unmarried teens have plummeted

[johnkerryyip145]

Here's the link:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/krwashbureau/20050929/ts_krwashbureau/_teensex

Anybody else read this article and find it weird that this report seems to be measuring improvements from 1991 to 2001, yet no mention of anything between 2001 and now? There must be available data for the last few years, don't you think? I guess it just goes to show you how much better off we were just a few years ago. I wonder if these trends are actually continuing.

[lakemonster11]

1. Hmmmm

"The trend reflects a country that's "grown more conservative sexually and socially," Santelli said."


I don't think that teenage abstinance is necessarily "conservative." And contraceptives certainly aren't.

[Melodybe]

2. More blow jobs, less sex

hence the repubs fixation with oral sex.

Or was that Dr. Phil?

[LaPera]

3. Except were they teach abstinence only...

Pregnancy & Childbirth | Ohio High School's Teen Pregnancy Rate Higher Than National Average


Thirteen percent of the 490 girls at Timken High School in Canton, Ohio, are pregnant, contrasting with the national average of 8%, which has been falling over the past decade, the AP/Yahoo! News reports. Teen pregnancy "is a widespread issue" in many urban areas, according to Jay Green, chair of the University of Arkansas' education reform department. Green and Greg Forster, both senior fellows at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, released a report in January 2004 that found 20% of urban 12th graders and 14% of suburban 12th graders have been pregnant. Since 2001, the Ohio Department of Health and the Bush administration have awarded $32 million in grants to state agencies for abstinence education. Timken High School offers an abstinence-based sex education program, but Joanne Hinton, whose 16-year-old daughter is pregnant, said that the program is insufficient. "It's time to take the blinders off and realize that these kids are having sex," she said (Mabin, AP/Yahoo! News, 9/1). Pregnant teens at Timken can enroll in a Pregnancy Life Skills class, which began this year after the school nurse received many requests for individual counseling (Garvey, New York Post, 9/4).

[NMMNG]

5. But of course

It's only those who choose to stick their heads in the sand and ignore facts who think that "abstinence only" sex-ed is effective. :eyes:

[Dogmudgeon]

4. The world has become a mean and cold place

Of course kids don’t fuck as much as they used to. The world has been filled with imaginary dangers, including the danger of taking your clothes off, hugging, and making the numbing isolation go away for a little while.

There is an absolute sex frenzy going on. Everything is pedophilia, and we’re throwing people in prison for the slightest excuse, except for the high-powered priests and potentates who can invade any orifice of any pre-teen, teen, or adult they desire.

The teens know this. They know that if they date someone 18 or over when they are under 18, their boy/girlfriend could go to prison for decades. They hear prison anal-rape jokes day in and day out. And when it’s not pedophilia, it’s something else. It might be infidelity, betrayal by sex or by soul. It might be the mental afflictions of self-loathing and sexual aversion. Christianity and “Pee Cee” compete in the moral realm, and someone is always ready to invoke AIDS. And at the end of the brief and unsatisfying sexual line, they, too, will be brought to the heel of a master they can neither understand nor resist.

Sex becomes power and debasement. In rebellion, the kids stop fucking. And when they look to their parents, the unspoken dialog tells them that their parents have not escaped, either. The impotence, the anorgasmia, the sex-organ cancers. The pain and resignation. The age of parental tyranny has passed. That same unconcerned, cold world has crushed the life out of Mom and Dad.

And they read the papers, you know; they read the newsfeeds on the Internet, even the ones from overseas, where American press conformity doesn’t exist. Kids can put 2 and 2 together. They know that hard times are coming, if they haven’t already arrived. Elections can be stolen. The Constitution is worthless. The USA is an international disgrace. Oil is becoming pricey, the infrastructure of our republic is being neglected and/or sold to the highest bidder, and the very Earth and its climate is changing in ways that will match the cold, mean place in the heart of society.

But if you listen closely, you’ll hear it -- deep in the souls of our world’s children, it’s happening. They know that they have more power than they were told, they know that love can be created, and they know that they are capable of the audacity needed to prevail.

We are not the Greatest Generation; we are the Great Failures. But our children will redeem us, not as a generation, but as a species. Just as Jonathan and Martha Kent knew, our children are only on loan to us for a short time -- and like their foster son Jor-El, our children will be our heroes. They will be the Supermen and Women of Steel, of flesh and blood and hope and humanity, who will save our dying world and rebuild our wrecked dreams.

So fuck, my children; fuck as if the world depended on it. Because it does depend on it.

Re-make love. Re-make the world.

--p!

[flordehinojos]

6. a sharp contrast with what's happening in PALM BEACH COUNTY, FLA.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/palmbeach/sfl-pteenparents29sep29,0,4037199.story?track=mostemailedlink

Forty-one Palm Beach County girls younger than 15 delivered babies last year -- twice as many as the year before and the most since 1998.

Almost 300 county high school girls each year are giving birth to their second or third child.

Overall births among 15- to 19-year-olds are up in the past two years,although as you see from this next Paragraph, the article claims that totals for teen pregnancies across the state are dropping...hmmm...one wonders how statistics are gathered in jeb's state while totals across Florida are dropping even as the state's population rises.

[rodeodance]

7. seems to be pointing to less conraception and carrying the preg. to term.

Forty-one Palm Beach County girls younger than 15 delivered babies last year -- twice as many as the year before and the most since 1998.

Almost 300 county high school girls each year are giving birth to their second or third child.

[Nikia]

8. I don't think that any of that is bad

Obviously, it is harder for teen parents to raise children than adults. Teens usually have many things going on in their life that makes them unready to be parents. The fact that they are having less babies is a good thing.
Contraceptive use, especially condomns is a good thing. There is no reason not to take appropriate precautions. Frankly anyone should be cautious about having sex with someone, who they know has been sexually active, who says that they won't use a condomn. Besides AIDS, there are a lot of sexually transmitted diseases out there. IT is good that teens are protecting themselves against it.
I don't think that it is necessarily bad that teens are delaying the age at which they have intercourse provided that they feel that it is their choice. Teens have a lot of things going on in their lives that they can put their energies into. In my opinion, sex should also be between equal partners. I don't think that it is bad to want to develop more as a person before engaging in sex.
As Jocelyn Elders said "Masturbation should be taught in school." There are ways that one can relieve ones sexual tension without involving another person.
As for as companionship and relationships, there are ways to have those without sex too.