Who Would Have Thought?
On MSNBC a report on an upcoming study: Teen birth rates highest in most religious states
… Mississippi topped the list for conservative religious beliefs and teen birth rates, according to the study results, which will be detailed in a forthcoming issue of the journal Reproductive Health.
It is an amazing coincidence how many of the states that are at the top of this list are also at the top of my Welfare States post.
Gee, you would have thought that all of the Federally funded “Abstinence Only” education in these states would have been more successful than it apparently was. 😈
4 comments
i’ve read descriptions of some of those abstinence-only programs. it’s so depressing [and enraging] that i can’t even bring myself to joke about them anymore.
.-= last blog ..dog-liek tyeping detected =-.
Unlike hipparchia, I can still repeat my one-liner that explains everything, I think: For teenage males, “abstinence makes the front grow harder.”
.-= last blog ..Mary Travers, Dead At 72 =-.
The people who think that abstinence works have forgotten, or never experienced puberty.
Perhaps they want the world to suffer because they couldn’t get a prom date.
You have to be seriously screwed up mentally to believe that it will work if you have ever dealt with teenagers. There is no percentage for the species in chastity.
Folks wonder why poor people have so many children. Well, the question is, why not? If you’re poor, the more workers you can cram into one household, the more likely it is that you’re going to be able to afford food and shelter for that household. And putting the whole extended family into one household — and producing plenty more extended family, i.e., more workers at some point within the next 15 years — simply makes sense from that perspective. It’s only us middle-class and up folks, who want our children to be similarly middle-class and know that we’re going to have to expend considerable resources to make that happen, who view children as an expense rather than as a future contributor to the family compound.
In short, for the poor, children are future income. So why NOT have children? Have enough children, and at some point in the future you may not even have to work anymore! Given the pathetic sums that the poor get from Social Security/SSI, it’s the closest thing to a retirement pension that any poor person will ever get.
– Badtux the Socioeconomic Penguin