Surveying Teens on Raincoat Usage

Today’s teens are largely clueless about the reality of illegitimacy, Jeannine Stein of the Los Angeles Times reports. Oh, and she also reported on their contraception usage.

The results, released Wednesday by the National Center for Health Statistics, found that 17% of 15- to 19-year-olds used periodic abstinence, or the calendar rhythm method, as a form of contraception in the period from 2006 to 2008. In 2002, 11% of teens used that method.

"That was pretty much a surprise," said Joyce Abma, lead author of the study and a demographer with the center. "The rhythm method is associated with a pretty high failure rate — on average, 25% of women will become pregnant during the first year of using that method. It's not a welcome development, especially in combination with the fact that overall, contraceptive use hasn't changed significantly from the last survey."

Yeah, will, the pill doesn't work when it isn't taken, either.

How closely do they stick to it? And do the girls have enough of history to know their cycles well enough?

The poll of 2,767 teens, which was part of the National Survey of Family Growth, also found that more teens than in years past said they agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: "It is OK for an unmarried female to have a child." Among male teens in the current survey, 64% agreed or strongly agreed, while in 2002 50% did. Among female teens that number was 71%, not significantly different from 2002.

Sad. Most people, when presented with the cold hard facts, can see the problems associated with children being born out of wedlock. Are these teens being given those facts? Most aren't. Instead, they are being fed a steady diet of moral relativism and accommodation, and how many of them have been raised out of wedlock themselves?

Unfortunately, the babies can't be more or less written out of the picture, like on "Murphy Brown".

In other significant differences from previous surveys, among male teens who had not yet had sex, 12% said the reason was that they didn't want to get a girl pregnant. In 2002, 25% of male teens who had not yet had sex cited that reason. However, condom use among male teens is up — 81% of never-married males in the current survey said they used them at first intercourse, compared with 71% in 2002.

Here's the most effective method of preventing pregnancy: not having intercourse.