MOST U.S. HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS HAVE NEVER HAD SEX: Carolyn Moynihan

at MercatorNet: Here is some important info from the US that we missed last week. A report from the federal health monitoring agency, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), brings the news that births to teenagers aged 15-19 are down by 44 per cent on 1990. The 2010 birth rate for that age group of 34.3 per 1000 females represents a 70-year low, and record lows for all racial/ethnic groups.

Actually, by itself a lower teenage birth-rate is an equivocal statistic. It could have been brought down by abortion. It could mean that hundreds of thousands of young women are on hormonal contraceptives that make them vulnerable to diseases and facilitate harmful relationships. It is a matter for ethical evaluation whether it is worse for an 18- or 19-year-old to have a baby than to be subject to these alternatives.

The good news is that the dramatic drop in pregnancies is related first and foremost to increased sexual abstinence among teens. Those reporting (in the National Survey of Family Growth) that they had never had sexual intercourse increased from 48.9 per cent in 1995 to 56.7 per cent in 2006-2010 - a 16 per cent change. Significantly, this increase was greater among 18- to 19-year-olds (from 28.9 per cent to 36.5 per cent, which = 26 per cent increase) than among 15- to 17-year olds (from 61.4 per cent to 72.9 per cent = 19 per cent).

That suggests at least three-quarters of high school teens have never had vaginal sex, and more than a third of those starting college. Well over half of the combined age-groups say they have never had sex. You can believe them or not, but there is no evidence to support a statement like, “Most American teens have had sex by the time they leave high school.” more

Labels: abstinence, adolescence, contraception, culture, premarital sex, race, virginity

posted by Eve at 10:28 PM VOTE

YOUNG CATHOLIC WOMEN TRY TO MODERNIZE THE MESSAGE ON BIRTH CONTROL: Washington Post

reports:

Ashley McGuire fell in love with the Catholic Church five years ago, after reading its teaching against artificial birth control.

McGuire, then a skeptical Protestant college student, initially saw the ban as a mandatory march to “domestic slavery.” But the more she read, the more she was blown away by the idea that sex — and women’s bodies — must be about more than physical pleasure.

Yet the images the church uses to promote its own method of birth control freaked her out. Pamphlets for what the church calls natural family planning feature photos of babies galore. A church-sponsored class on the method uses a book with a woman on the cover, smiling as she balances a grocery bag on one hip, a baby on the other.

“My guess is 99 out of 100 21st-century women trying to navigate the decision about contraception would see that cover and run for the hills,” McGuire wrote in a post on her blog, Altcatholicah, which is aimed at Catholic women.

McGuire, 26, of Alexandria is part of a movement of younger, religiously conservative Catholic women who are trying to rebrand an often-ignored church teaching: its ban on birth control methods such as the Pill. Arguing that church theology has been poorly explained and encouraged, they want to shift the image of a traditional Catholic woman from one at home with children to one with a great, communicative sex life, a chemical-free body and babies only when the parents think the time is right.

The movement sees an opportunity: President Obama’s decision this year to require most religious employers, like employers in general, to provide contraception coverage. The move angered Catholics so much that it cracked open a discussion about contraception that has been largely taboo for decades because there’s so much disagreement about it.

“More priests have given sermons on this in the past few weeks than in the last 50 years,” said Janet Smith, a conservative theologian who teaches at the Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit.

more

Labels: Catholic Church, contraception, natural family planning, religion

posted by Eve at 6:47 PM VOTE

THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION AND THE WILL TO DISBELIEVE: Eve

reviews Mary Eberstadt's new book in the University Bookman:

Mary Eberstadt’s slim new essay collection, Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, may at first be more notable for what it doesn’t contain than for what it does. Unlike most books on contemporary sexual culture and its crises, Adam and Eve doesn’t have a plan to save the world. It’s not really a big-picture book, despite a chapter in which contraception is revealed as the major villain. Instead, Adam and Eve reads like a travel guide for an unpleasant safari somewhere east of Eden, hitting a few major areas quickly and even somewhat randomly. ...

The biggest flaws in Eberstadt’s book are a lack of focus and a total absence of economic realities. I’m no Marxist, but economic pressures do affect our culture of unmarriage, and our sexual dysfunctions widen the class divide; neither of these causal arrows gets discussed in Adam and Eve. “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?” Everybody, apparently.

That said, the book makes a few strong contributions. Eberstadt spends a lot of time discussing the damage done by pornography: body-image problems, greater tolerance for risky sex, earlier sexual initiation, and more sexual partners. The result is an overall jadedness, an inability to be satisfied with a single spouse or potential spouse. Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker described the hidden effects of porn on young adults’ sexual culture in their forthright, careful 2010 Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think About Marrying, and Eberstadt backs them up while providing further citations and avenues for exploration. She overreaches here, as elsewhere—it’s odd to blame Anthony Weiner’s public troubles on porn when powerful men have been making stupid choices about sex since time immemorial—but it’s clear that porn is affecting heterosexual culture more than most of us realize.

Eberstadt also points out what one major study called the “Paradox of Declining Women’s Happiness”: Over the past several decades, while women’s life choices have expanded, their self-reported happiness has decreased.

more

Labels: class, contraception, culture, gender differences, heterosexual couples, men, pornography, sex, women

posted by Eve at 5:26 PM VOTE

TEENAGE BIRTH RATE IS LOWEST SINCE 1946: NYT

health blog [Why no abortion stats whatsoever? I know teen pregnancy rates are also falling, but still. --E]:

Fewer teenagers gave birth in 2010 than in any other year since 1946, government researchers announced last week, and there is good evidence that today’s teenagers are initiating sex later and using birth control more consistently than previous generations did.

According to a report from the National Center for Health Statistics, birth rates among young women ages 15 to 19 fell in all but three states and in all racial, ethnic and age groups. From 2009 to 2010, the rate of teenage births fell by 9 percent, to 34.9 per thousand, the lowest rate ever reported in the 65 years for which data is available.

“I think the current generation of youth are perhaps more conscientious and cautious,” said Dr. John Santelli, a professor of clinical population and family health at Columbia University who was not involved in writing the report.

Data from surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention back up Dr. Santelli’s assertion. Since 1991, the percentage of teenagers who have ever had sex has decreased by 15 percent, the number who have had sex with four or more partners has decreased by 26 percent, and the percentage using condoms has increased by 32 percent.

more

Labels: abstinence, contraception, culture, demographics, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, race, sex education, teenage pregnancy

posted by Eve at 4:49 PM VOTE

PSST! OBAMA LOST THE BIRTH CONTROL MANDATE DEBATE: Mickey Kaus

blogs:

Caught cocooning in public: Here’s what the NYT‘s story on its latest poll told readers:

In recent weeks, there has been much debate over the government’s role in guaranteeing insurance coverage for contraception, including for those who work for religious organizations. The poll found that women were split as to whether health insurance plans should cover the costs of birth control and whether employers with religious objections should be able to opt out. [E.A.]

If the Times says women were “split,” you know that must mean they were actually narrowly against the NYT‘s preferred position. Sure enough, when asked, “Should health insurance plans for all employees have to cover the full cost of birth control for female employees or should employers be able to opt out for moral or religious reasons?” women favored opting out by a 46-44 margin. The margin increased to a decisive 53-38 for “religiously affiliated employers, such as a hospital or university.”

That’s among women. Unbeknownst to those who read only the Times‘ main story, the poll asked the same question to men. They were not split. Men favored opting out by a 20 point margin (57 vs. 37), except when a “religiously affiliated employer” was involved, in which case the margin increased to 25 points. Combining men and women, a substantial majority (51-40) favors allowing an opt-out–increasing to 57-36 where religiously-affiliated institutions are involved.

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Labels: Barack Obama, contraception, culture, religious liberty, women

posted by Eve at 9:02 PM VOTE

FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION RUNS FULL-PAGE "QUIT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH" AD IN TODAY'S NEW YORK TIMES: Friendly Atheist

blogs.

Labels: atheism, Catholic Church, contraception, culture, religion

posted by Eve at 6:36 PM VOTE

VATICAN DISPATCHES ELITE TEAM OF BISHOPS TO SABOTAGE CONTRACEPTIVE MANUFACTURER

Yes, it's from The Onion.

Labels: Catholic Church, contraception, culture, satire

posted by Eve at 3:30 PM VOTE

SHOULD YOU GET A VASECTOMY?: Benjamin Percy

at GQ:

My wife and I have two children, and we love them dearly, dearly, the sleep-stealing, bank-account-depleting little trolls. But some days—when the living room is knee-deep in toys, when my daughter has flushed an apple down the toilet and my son has stripped off his clothes and run into the yard—we halfjokingly say that we can't wait until they become teenagers and ignore us. We can handle the two of them, barely. But a third? Outnumbered, we would have to switch from man-on-man to zone defense, and I can't help but shudder when I imagine a red-faced baby wailing through the night, the bank statements withering further, the walls crayoned, and the laundry hampers reeking of spit-up and poo. An unexpected pregnancy, in other words, would be a nightmare.

That's what happened to our friends. They had an Oops. We all know an Oops. The husband rips through his condom or the wife forgets to take her pill.

Oops. The parents of the Oops always say it was meant to be. They say they can't imagine life without their dear third or fourth or (mercy!) fifth child. But they say these things years later, after the kids are grown, when the memory of sexless and sleepless nights, the financial and emotional panic, have long since faded. When our friends first broke the news about their accidental pregnancy, we told them, "Congratulations," but our smiles trembled at the edges. That same week my wife got on the phone and scheduled my vasectomy. We'd been discussing the idea for months, and I'd finally assented. Think of all the sex we would have! Wild sex! No pregnancy anxiety. No frantic rummaging through the bathroom cabinet for the last nerve-deadening condom. No doublechecking the expiration date stamped on the foil and struggling to unroll the rubber one way, then the other, hoping all the while that the mood won't pass. We'd be able to do it anytime, anywhere. I could step into the shower or push up against her in the produce section at Whole Foods, jog my eyebrows, and say, "You wanna?"

Now that I have a date with a surgeon, an appointment with a knife, shadows have begun to steal across my fantasies of rolling around in the organic lemongrass. I find myself thinking of Cocoa. Cocoa was my childhood dog, a standard poodle with floppy hair. He humped everything in sight—sofas, legs, our cat, Mr. Meow. My parents finally took him to the vet. He returned sad-eyed and tamed, with a scab between his legs that took a long time to heal. A vasectomy isn't a castration, I know. Still, I cannot help but feel that, on some level, I, too, am being disciplined. That I, too, am a bad, bad dog.

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Labels: children, contraception, culture, Fathers, gender, men, parenting

posted by Eve at 11:08 AM VOTE

FATHER, WE'RE READY FOR THAT HOMILY ON CONTRACEPTION NOW: Jennifer Fulwiler

blogs at the National Catholic Register:

A couple of weeks ago, our priest gave a homily about contraception. While speaking about the Health and Human Services mandate, our associate pastor, Fr. Jonathan Raia, made a few allusions to the fact that the Church believes that contraception is bad. There were over a thousand people packed into the building, and a slight but noticeable tension developed as he inched closer and closer to the subject. This most controversial of Catholic teachings had been splashed all over the news in recent days, ridiculed and denounced throughout popular culture, and the question hung in the air: “Is he going to go there?”

He did.

You can hear the whole homily on our parish website here. In the second half of his talk, he gently but unflinchingly explained that the Catholic Church teaches that contraception is wrong. He gave a bit of background about the reasoning behind this stance, cleared up some common misconceptions, and pointed people to resources where they could find out more about methods of Natural Family Planning. As he spoke, the thought came to mind:

I think we’re finally ready for this.

more

Labels: Catholic Church, contraception, religion

posted by Eve at 8:44 PM VOTE

"98% OF CATHOLIC WOMEN"?: What's Wrong with the World

blogs:

Recently I received a phone call from my non-Christian (as far as I know) philosopher friend Neil Manson who, because he has an active and fair mind, had been exercised over what seemed to him the high FQ (Fishiness Quotient) of the statistical meme presently going around to the effect that "98% of Catholic women use birth control." Or something. Maybe "98% of Catholic women have used birth control." The former is obviously ludicrous, as it would seem to include elderly Catholic women, of whom it seems plausible that there are more than 2% among Catholics. Anyway, Neil wanted to know if I had read anything debunking the statistic.

Well, I had to admit that I hadn't. This is mostly because the relevance of the claim to the HHS's mandate is, to put it mildly, obscure. If a large percentage of Jainists are chowing down on hamburgers on the side, it hardly follows that an expressly Jainist charitable organization should be forced by the federal government to fund a plan that buys free hamburgers for its employees. If a bunch of Quakers turn out to have gun licenses, employees of an expressly Quaker organization are not therefore entitled to have their fees paid to a shooting range or their ammo. provided at no cost through an employer plan. There is this commonsense notion that organizations that are explicitly identified as religious are allowed to uphold the actual doctrinal and behavioral standards of their respective religious bodies. Whether the rank and file membership of that religious body follow those standards in daily life should be irrelevant.

Still, it has proven rather interesting to look into the statistical claim.

Here's how it works. The study is here [pdf]. The relevant tables are Figure 3 on p. 6 and the second Supplementary Table on p. 8. The survey was limited to women between 15-44. Ah, well, that explains how we weren't including the elderly, but it also means that the silly "percent of all Catholic women" thing should be chucked out right from the beginning. More strikingly, as Neil pointed out to me after looking up the study, it excluded any women who were a) not sexually active, where that is defined as having had sexual intercourse in the past three months (there go all the nuns), b) postpartum, c) pregnant, or d) trying to get pregnant! In other words, the study was specifically designed (as the prose discussion on p. 8 makes explicit, in bold print) to include only women for whom a pregnancy would be unintended and who are "at risk" of becoming pregnant. Whether or not it included women who considered themselves neither trying nor not trying to get pregnant (there are some such women in the world) is unclear. It's also unclear whether it included women who have had their reproductive organs removed because of some medical problem. Presumably the study was intended to exclude women in both of these categories, as neither would count as a woman "at risk of an unintended pregnancy."

quite a bit more (and examples of the 98% statistic in use)

Labels: Barack Obama, Catholic Church, contraception, health care, religion, sex, women

posted by Eve at 10:50 PM VOTE

TIME TO ADMIT IT: THE CHURCH HAS ALWAYS BEEN RIGHT ON BIRTH CONTROL: Michael Brendan Dougherty and Pascal-Emmanuel Dobry

in Business Insider:

...Many people, (including our editor) are wondering why the Catholic Church doesn't just ditch this requirement. They note that most Catholics ignore it, and that most everyone else finds it divisive, or "out-dated." C'mon! It's the 21st century, they say! Don't they SEE that it's STUPID, they scream.

Here's the thing, though: the Catholic Church is the world's biggest and oldest organization. It has buried all of the greatest empires known to man, from the Romans to the Soviets. It has establishments literally all over the world, touching every area of human endeavor. It's given us some of the world's greatest thinkers, from Saint Augustine on down to René Girard. When it does things, it usually has a good reason. Everyone has a right to disagree, but it's not that they're a bunch of crazy old white dudes who are stuck in the Middle Ages.

So, what's going on?

The Church teaches that love, marriage, sex, and procreation are all things that belong together. That's it. But it's pretty important. And though the Church has been teaching this for 2,000 years, it's probably never been as salient as today.

Today's injunctions against birth control were re-affirmed in a 1968 document by Pope Paul VI called Humanae Vitae. He warned of four results if the widespread use of contraceptives was accepted:

General lowering of moral standards
A rise in infidelity, and illegitimacy
The reduction of women to objects used to satisfy men.
Government coercion in reproductive matters.

Does that sound familiar?

Because it sure sounds like what's been happening for the past 40 years.

As George Akerloff wrote in Slate over a decade ago,

By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother, the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the father.

more

Labels: Catholic Church, cohabitation, contraception, demographics, Fathers, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, population control, premarital sex

posted by Eve at 12:35 AM VOTE

TEEN PREGNANCY RATE HITS 30-YEAR LOW: KJ Dell'Antonia

at the NYTimes parenting blog:

Between 2006 and 2010, the number of unmarried teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19 who reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that they’ve had sex dropped below 50 percent. The C.D.C. described this as an actual drop in the number of teenagers having sex; the cynical addition of the word “reported” is mine: obviously the only way for the C.D.C. to determine whether those teenagers were sexually active (and how) was to ask them, and I’ve expressed my doubts about the resulting data.

Now the Guttmacher Institute is backing up those teenagers with hard facts: in 2008, the pregnancy rate among teenagers dropped [pdf] to its lowest point in more than 30 years. In 1990, when the rate was at its highest, 116.9 out of every thousand girls between the ages of 15 and 19 became pregnant; in 2008, only 67.8 did. Among young women under 15, the pregnancy rate fell even more. ...

A representative of the Guttmacher Institute just let me know that it did, in fact, draw some conclusions. “A large body of research has shown that the long-term decline in teen pregnancy, birth and abortion rates was driven primarily by improved use of contraception among teens.”

more

Labels: abortion, adolescence, contraception, culture, pregnancy, premarital sex, teenage pregnancy

posted by Eve at 12:32 AM VOTE

MORE PROTESTANTS OPPOSE BIRTH CONTROL: NYTimes

"Beliefs" column from last month:

...Certain religious groups tend to have large families, whether for reasons of religious observance, as with some Jews, or because it is culturally approved, as in Mormonism. But 50 years ago, large families were unusual in evangelical Protestantism. A Santorum-size family would have been seen as a marker of exotic, sinister religiosity. Big families were stigmatized: they were for immigrants and Catholics, or for the rural poor.

Since then, however, there has been a shift in evangelical thinking about contraception, and therefore about big families. You can see it in the Duggar family, the enthusiastic Santorum supporters who star on the reality television show “19 Kids & Counting.” You can read about it in books like “Quiverfull,” Kathryn Joyce’s 2009 account of Christians who forgo contraception to add children to the Lord’s army. And you can hear it in the teachings of theologians like Russell D. Moore, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary dean who warns evangelicals to be skeptical of the “contraceptive culture.”

From the beginning of Christian history until the 19th century, the teaching held that contraception was sinful, says Allan Carlson, the author of “Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873-1973.” “ ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth’ — until the 1920s, all Protestants formally read that as being a ban on contraception,” Dr. Carlson says, “and all Protestants held to the Christian convention that birth control was sinful, for the same reason and in the same way abortion was.”

But that consensus “started to break down in the 1920s,” Dr. Carlson says. The Church of England accepted birth control in 1930, and American Protestant bodies soon followed. As recently as “10 or 20 years ago,” Mr. Santorum’s rejection of birth control “would have been an immediate no” for nearly all Protestants.

Today, however, even those evangelical Protestants who use contraception — the vast majority, it would seem — have developed a cultural respect, in some cases a reverence, for those who do not.

“For evangelicals, an anticontraception position is not seen as exclusively Roman Catholic, as it would have been in the past,” said Jenell Paris, who teaches anthropology at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. She pointed to several developments in evangelical culture to explain this shift.

“Our understanding of hormonal birth control methods — the pill, the patch, the ring — have changed,” said Dr. Paris, alluding to those who believe, on scant evidence, that these methods of birth control can contribute to long-term infertility. “Abortion politics have changed. Views of women in the workplace have changed. Feminism has changed. All that has contributed to a number of evangelicals embracing a no-birth-control policy, or at least making it comprehensible.”

more

Labels: abortion, Christianity, contraception, culture, family size, feminism, religion

posted by Eve at 12:29 AM VOTE

FAILING TO CONNECT THE DOTS ON CONTRACEPTION: Howard P. Kainz

at First Things:

...One thing the GOP debate illustrates dramatically is the broader cultural sea change that has taken place in regard to contraception. It may seem that the “catalyst” for this change in attitude was simply the invention of the contraceptive pill in the early 1960s, which was far more convenient than existing methods of birth control. But even before such convenient methods surfaced, contraception in previous decades had become progressively more in vogue, even for Christians who had previously strenuously opposed it. The following March 22, 1931 editorial of the Washington Post in the aftermath of the 1930 Episcopalian Lambeth Conference, which spearheaded the acceptance of contraception for Protestants in the U.S., is absolutely inconceivable today:

It is impossible to reconcile the doctrine of the divine institution of marriage with any modernistic plan for the mechanical regulation or suppression of human birth. The church must either reject the plain teachings of the Bible or reject schemes for the “scientific” production of human souls. Carried to its logical conclusion, the committee’s report if carried into effect would sound the death-knell of marriage as a holy institution, by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be “careful and restrained” is preposterous.

Anyone reading the Post today would consider this a forgery or the result of Internet hacking. But such was once the majority opinion, reflected by the paper. But little by little, almost all Protestant denominations fell in line.

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Labels: Catholic Church, Christianity, contraception, culture, gay marriage, Marriage, religion

posted by Eve at 12:27 AM VOTE

UNIVERSITY SELLING MORNING-AFTER PILL IN VENDING MACHINE: WTAE

reports:

Vending machines at one Pennsylvania University doesn't just dispense soda and snacks -- it sells the morning-after pill.

At Shippensburg University, getting access to Plan B, the emergency contraception pill is as easy as getting a soda. Students can now buy the pill at a vending machine on campus. ...

Dr. Serr says that somewhere between 350 and 400 doses are sold each year to the female population. The pill can be legally sold over-the-counter to anyone 17 or older.

more

Labels: abortion, contraception, culture, premarital sex, universities

posted by Eve at 9:32 PM VOTE

ARMY SILENCED CHAPLAINS LAST SUNDAY: Kathryn Jean Lopez

at National Review Online:

In Catholic churches across the country, parishioners were read letters from the pulpit this weekend from bishops in their diocese about the mandate from the Department of Health and Human Services giving Catholics a year before they’ll be required to start violating their consciences on insurance coverage for contraception, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs. But not in the Army.

A statement released this afternoon — which happens to be the 67th anniversary of the sinking of the USS Dorchester, on which four chaplains lost their lives – from the Archdiocese for Military Services explains:

On Thursday, January 26, Archbishop Broglio emailed a pastoral letter to Catholic military chaplains with instructions that it be read from the pulpit at Sunday Masses the following weekend in all military chapels. The letter calls on Catholics to resist the policy initiative, recently affirmed by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, for federally mandated health insurance covering sterilization, abortifacients and contraception, because it represents a violation of the freedom of religion recognized by the U.S. Constitution.

The Army’s Office of the Chief of Chaplains subsequently sent an email to senior chaplains advising them that the Archbishop’s letter was not coordinated with that office and asked that it not be read from the pulpit. The Chief’s office directed that the letter was to be mentioned in the Mass announcements and distributed in printed form in the back of the chapel. ...

Following a discussion between Archbishop Broglio and the Secretary of the Army, The Honorable John McHugh, it was agreed that it was a mistake to stop the reading of the Archbishop’s letter. Additionally, the line: “We cannot — we will not — comply with this unjust law” was removed by Archbishop Broglio at the suggestion of Secretary McHugh over the concern that it could potentially be misunderstood as a call to civil disobedience.

more

Labels: Catholic Church, contraception, culture, religious liberty

posted by Eve at 4:17 PM VOTE

FEDS: RELIGIOUS EMPLOYERS MUST COVER THE PILL: Associated Press

reports:

Many church-affiliated institutions will have to cover free birth control for employees, the Obama administration announced Friday in an election-year move that outraged religious groups, fueling a national debate about the reach of government.

In a concession, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said nonprofit institutions such as church-affiliated hospitals, colleges and social service agencies will have one additional year to comply with the requirement, issued in regulations under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.

"I believe this proposal strikes the appropriate balance between respecting religious freedom and increasing access to important preventive services," Sebelius said in a statement.

Yet the concession was unlikely to stop a determined effort by opponents to block or overturn the rule. If they fail, some predicted that religious employers would simply drop coverage for their workers, opting instead to pay fines to the federal government under the health care law.

more

Labels: Catholic Church, contraception, religious liberty

posted by Eve at 11:32 PM VOTE

CDC: MANY TEEN MOMS DIDN'T THINK THEY WOULD GET PREGNANT: USA Today

reports:

A new government study suggests a lot of teenage girls are clueless about their chances of getting pregnant.

In a survey of thousands of teenage mothers who had unintended pregnancies, about a third said they didn't use birth control because they didn't believe they could pregnant. ...

The researchers interviewed nearly 5,000 teenage girls in 19 states who gave birth after unplanned pregnancies in 2004 through 2008. The survey was done through mailed questionnaires with telephone follow-up.

About half of the girls in the survey said they were not using any birth control when they got pregnant. That's higher than surveys of teens in general, which have found that fewer than 20 percent said they didn't use contraception the last time they had sex. ...

Only 13 percent said they didn't use birth control because they had trouble getting it.

Another finding: Nearly a quarter of the teen moms said they did not use contraception because their partner did not want them to. That suggests that sex education must include not only information about anatomy and birth control, but also about how to deal with situations in which a girl feels pressured to do something she doesn't want to, Gavin said.

The findings are sobering, Albert said. But it's important to remember that the overall teen birth rate has been falling for some time, and recently hit its lowest mark in about 70 years.

more

Labels: adolescence, contraception, culture, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, sex, teenage pregnancy

posted by Eve at 1:26 AM VOTE

CATHOLICS SEE DIFFERENCE IN LOYALTY TO FAITH, HIERARCHY: Religion News Service

reports:

American Catholics have by and large remained loyal to the core teachings and sacraments of their faith, but increasingly tune out the hierarchy on issues of sexual morality, according to a new study released Monday (Oct. 24)

The sweeping survey shows that over the last quarter-century, U.S. Catholics have become increasingly likely to say that individuals, not church leaders, have the final say on abortion, homosexuality, and divorce and remarriage.

That trend holds true across generational and ideological divides, and even applies to weekly Mass attenders, according to the survey, which has been conducted every six years since 1987. ...

The report identified two-thirds of U.S. Catholics as “moderately committed,” a group that inched up in size as the share of “highly committed” has shrunk from 27 percent in 1987 to 19 percent this year. ...

The issue of homosexuality showed one of the largest gaps between the pulpit and the pews. The portion of Catholics who say church leaders have “the final say” on homosexuality has plunged by half, from 32 percent to 16 percent, over the past 25 years, while those who say individuals make the final call has shot up from 39 percent to 57 percent.

Dillon noted that other issues have remained relatively stable, which leads her to conclude that Catholics are taking their cues from the larger culture, much like they did on birth control. ...

The loosening ties to the authority of the hierarchy may also parallel a diminishing commitment to the poor and to parish life.

In the 2011 survey, 60 percent of Catholics said you could be a good Catholic without donating time or money to help the poor, up from 44 percent in 2005. Similarly, three-quarters (74 percent) said you could be a good Catholic without donating time or money to a parish, up from 58 percent six years earlier. ...

The online survey of 1,400 adult Catholics (with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points) was conducted by D’Antonio, Gautier and Dillon in cooperation with the National Catholic Reporter, an independent newsweekly.

more (and see also GetReligion's comment: "I predict that this can be summed up in one word — 'confession.'")

Labels: Catholic Church, contraception, culture, economics, homosexuality, religion

posted by Eve at 9:25 PM VOTE

BIRTH CONTROL PLAN: CONSCIENCE VS. SPECIAL INTERESTS: Timothy P. Carney

in the Washington Examiner:

President Obama this week used his health care law to hand a lucrative special favor to two industries that have ardently supported his party: Planned Parenthood and the drug industry.

The largesse came in the form of a rule proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services that would require all new insurance plans to cover the entire cost of all forms of prescription contraception -- including those that also act as abortion drugs.

This free-pills-for-all proposal embodies two dark themes of the Obama era: cronyism and trampling on the freedom of conscience.

Once again, Obama, who pretends to be battling the special interests, is rewarding powerful lobbies that support him. Even worse, the federal rule, which would effectively force everyone to purchase insurance that covers abortifacient contraceptives, also reveals the true shape of the Culture War in America: The Left uses the brutal tool of the government to impose its morality on everyone, forcing religious conservatives to act against conscience, all the while howling about imminent "theocracy."

more

Labels: abortion, contraception, culture, religious liberty

posted by Eve at 8:03 PM VOTE