Monbiot.com » Politically Transmitted Disease

Between 1990 and 2004, the birthrate among teenage girls fell sharply: by 46% for 15-17 year olds. The decline was unbroken throughout these years. (The same thing happened in the rest of the western world, though about 20 years earlier). But between 2005 and 2006, something odd happened: the teen birthrate increased by 3%. In 2007 it rose by another 1%. I think most people would agree that this is a tragedy. According to the UN agency Unicef, women who are born poor are twice as likely to stay that way if they have children as teenagers. They are more likely to remain unemployed, to suffer from depression and to become alcoholics or drug addicts (3). Similarly, the incidence of gonorrhea dropped for more than 20 years, then started to rise in 2004. After a long period of decline, syphilis among teenage boys began to increase in 2002; among girls in 2004.

The CDC makes no attempt to explain these findings, but the report contains four possible clues. The first is that between 1991 and 2007, the percentage of high school students who had ever had sex declined. So did the number of their sexual partners, and their level of sexual activity. But from 2005 onwards there was a levelling or reversal of all these trends(4). The second possible clue is that while the use of condoms among high school students rose steadily from 1991 to 2003, it stagnated then declined between 2003 and 2007(5). Towards the end of the Bush years, schoolchildren began abandoning condoms at the same time as their sexual activity rose.

The third clue is provided by the shocking data from the Hispanic community. Adolescent Hispanic girls have less sex than their non-Hispanic classmates; but they have three times as many children as non-Hispanic whites(6). Why? Because they are less likely to use contraceptives, probably because of the doctrines of the Catholic church.

But perhaps the most interesting clue is this one. The CDC has published a map of trends in the teenage birth rate. I ran it against a political map of the Union and found this: nine of the ten states with the highest increase in teenage births voted Republican in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections(7). (Eight of them voted for McCain in 2008.(8)) Among them are the Christian conservative heartlands of Kentucky, Alabama, Mississipi, Louisiana and Oklahoma. These are the places in which Bush’s abstinence campaigns were most enthusiastically promoted.