When you hear lazy pro-choicers like Jill at Feministe make horribly stupid generalizations (like blaming the increase completely on abstinence education) note that the majority of increase was amongst 18 and 19-year-olds.
But the new Guttmacher report rounds out the picture: in 2006, there were 71.5 pregnancies for every 1,000 women under the age of 20. That's 3% more than in 2005. The increase was concentrated among 18- and 19-year-olds — pregnancies among those 17 or younger rose only marginally — and occurred in a year when the number of abortions among teens rose 1%.
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18-and 19-year olds. The same people who were getting abstinence education while GWBush was Prez.
ReplyDeleteHow exactly does this statistic support your case???
OC,
ReplyDeleteFirst, I was unaware that Bush was in charge of every state and local sex education policy.
Second, abstinence-only education isn't really my cause. Part of my cause is showing how lazy some pro-choicers are when they generalize blame in such ridiculous ways.
But I do think it's certainly tougher to blame abstinence only education for the pregnancies of college-aged kids. If you're 19 and don't know that sex without birth control can lead to pregnancy, then no kind of education in high school education would have helped you.