Parents: The Bible’s Not Doing It
October 26, 2009 by Marijke Durning, RN
Filed under Sex
Parents who believe that their strong religious beliefs and raising their children in the church will prevent teen pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases may be surprised to learn that teen-age pregnancies are highest among the more religious states in the United States.
Of course, who can forget failed vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her teen daughter, Bristol Palin’s pregnancy. Here was a very in-your-face conservative who doesn’t want sex education in the schools, who believed that raising your child “right” and with God would keep her from getting pregnant – and her daughter became pregnant. Sure, she’s one teen among millions, but she’s not the only one whose parents believed that by preaching abstinence, their daughter wouldn’t get pregnant.
To find out if religion did help reduce teen-age pregnancies, researchers looked into the teen pregnancy rates according to the religiosity of their home state. To do this, the researchers searched through the U.S. census data for pregnancy and abortion information, and the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, which had been carried out by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The results of their study were published in the medical journal Reproductive Health.
What the researchers found was that the more religious states in the U.S. also had the highest teen pregnancy rates. They had lower abortion rates than other states, however.
Many parents believe that the best way to keep their daughters from getting pregnant is by preaching abstinence, believing that they will remain virgins. And, in a perfect world, this would likely be true. But this isn’t a perfect world and even in the Victorian days when sex wasn’t as in your face as it is now, women had sex when unmarried.
Sex education teaches young people about being responsible and preventing not only pregnancy, but sexually transmitted infections that could kill them. One would think that knowledge that would keep you from catching a potentially fatal illness would be more helpful than denying that sexual behavior will (and does) happen.
Does this finding surprise you?
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No, the finding doesn’t surprise me at all. I live in the South.