what’s up with the evangelical teen pregnancy epidemic?
Unpublished post, originally written 12/24/08 for my now defunct state of sex education blog on gURL.
When you think of a pregnant teen, who comes to mind? For a lot of people, it wouldn’t be a church going, purity ball attending evangelical Christian teen.
However, an article published this fall in the New Yorker explains that in a lot of cases this is exactly who is getting pregnant! The article reported on the findings of a survey done by Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Here are some of the things he discovered:
- 74% of white evangelical adolescents said that they believed in abstaining from sex before marriage.
Yet…
- Evangelical teenagers are more sexually active than Mormons,
mainline Protestants, and Jews. - White evangelical
Protestants are among the youngest teens to first have sex, on average first losing their virginity at 16. - Evangelical
Protestant teenagers are significantly less likely than other groups
to use contraception. Evangelicals are also among
the most likely to believe that using contraception will send the
message that they are looking for sex. - Only half of sexually active
teenagers in the study who said that they sought guidance from God or the Scriptures
when making a tough decision reported using contraception every time. - Alternately, sixty-nine per cent of sexually active youth who say that
they most often follow the counsel of a parent or another trusted adult
consistently use protection.
With the recent rise in teen pregnancy rates, it is important to look at all the contributing factors. However, I have a sneaky feeling that this information isn’t going to sit well with the abstinence-only, no sex before marriage crowd.
What do you think of this piece of the puzzle? Does it ring true to you?
