Saturday, June 24th, 2017
Stephan: I consider this to be good news. I expect teenagers to become sexually active, perhaps because that was my life. Perhaps because I study social outcome data and abstinence only is a dreadful policy and life choice; it produces markedly inferior outcomes. What matters to me is that teens have proper sex education, at the appropriation time, devoid of religious or political considerations, and that they use contraception. It appears they do. If this data is consistent with other research the majority of the 20% who became active but did not use contraception were associated with a conservative religious movement.
However, as the report also notes we still have a ways to go. Sex ed needs to get better and be more widely taught. In my view it should be taught as part of a course on how to be a healthy, happy, productive human being, based only on data, with no religious or political considerations in the course other than the acknowledgment that they exist.
We know what works. The real question is why are we doing that?
Credit: JPC-PROD via Shutterstock
Just over half of American teenagers are sexually active, and most report using some form of contraception, according to new research.
The study from the National Center for Health Statistics found that 55% of teens said they were having sex by age 18, and 80% of those teens used some form of protection during their first time. The findings come from surveys with 4,134 male and female teens ages 15 to 19 from 2011 through 2015.
Overall, fewer teens are having sex now than in the past. 42% of teen girls and 44% of teen boys reported having sex at least once—down about 9% for girls and 16% for boys from when the government group began tracking such numbers in 1988. The most common reasons teens gave for not having sex was that it was against their religion or morals, that they hadn’t found […]
