It’s like Slate’s Chris Kirk didn’t even read my post on Red State/Blue State pregnancy and abortion rates. (See also: Richard Florida conflating teen birth rates with teen pregnancy rates).
To review: Marcotte sees the high birth rates of Red States as indicators that abstinence-only education policies don’t work. Douthat pointed out that abortion limits the number of pregnancies that turn into births and that Marcotte’s analysis is incomplete without mentioning abortion. She responded by shifting the goal post and ended up jumbling teen pregnancy, socioeconomic status, and race.
Chris Kirk does the same. He provides a map showing teen birth rates and fails to mention the impact abortion has on the teen birth rate. He writes:
It’s easy to understand why New York City schools are handing out morning-after pills to teenage girls. Although teenage pregnancy and birth rates are declining nationally, teenage girls still give birth to hundreds of thousands of babies a year. To be precise, they gave birth to 367,678 in 2010 alone, according to the CDC. This map shows the birth rate among girls aged 15 to 19 by state. And it clearly shows that more conservative states have higher rates of teenage births.
In states such as Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, 1 out of 20 teenage girls gives birth every year. Using the most recent Census data on teenage populations, Arkansas has the highest rate, at 56 births per 1,000 teenage girls.
It’s no surprise that red states have higher rates. Many of them, including the seven states with the highest rates, do not require schools to teach contraception. Some states do not require sex education at all. Other states that do have sex education require teachers to stress abstinence and advise children to wait until marriage. Studies have concluded time and time again that abstinence-only curricula are not as effective at reducing teen pregnancies and births. (emphasis mine)
To throw a more nuanced argument into this, here is a piece about the decreased effectiveness of sex-ed in Red States. The author, affiliated with LiveScience, at least mentions a difference between birth rates and pregnancy rates and posits that perhaps pregnancy rates are similar across all states. This would indicate lesser effectiveness of sex-ed curriculum.
But to Kirk – So the high pregnancy rates in Red States have little to do with abortifacients but the city of New York has decided to use them anyway, and, boy, just watch those birth rates decline. But of course it wasn’t the dispersal of abortifaciants; it was the curriculum. Looking at Kirk’s map we notice that some of the states with a strong sex ed curriculum still have higher teen birth rates than many other states that have mandates for sex ed. North Carolina, South Carolina, and especially Alabama’s teen pregnancy problems haven’t been solved by this particular elixir.
New York and Mississippi have garnered a lot of attention here. Mississippi because, according to Marcotte, it has a high teenage birth rate and a high STD rate; New York because of its liberal contraception policy. That New York has the highest teen abortion rate in the nation (and 11th highest teen pregnancy rate
as of 2005 and according to the Guttmacher Institute) while Mississippi had a relatively low abortion rate does not seem to affect the progressive stance.
But looking at New Mexico might be more instructive.
It is one of the 17 U.S. states in which full-frontal sex ed is mandated by law, yet it has one of the highest teen birth rates. It is middle of the pack in terms of teen abortion rates. Why would this be? It does have a very high Hispanic population. Hispanic society tends to not place such curbs on teenage motherhood. This entrenched social norm would be harder to overturn compared to a state like New York or any other hardcore blue state. Such anti-pregnancy curriculum folds more easily into the prevailing culture. The same goes with Texas or Arkansas or Mississippi where there are not only a lot of poorer whites but also large Hispanic and black populations. Point being, there are many other hurdles to overcome in Red States compared to Blue States which won’t be solved with a figurative magic pill.
Progressives can’t admit that widespread abortion would “solve” the problem that sex ed can’t because, as Douthat
pointed out, they idealize abortion as being “safe, legal, and rare”. If it is something that needs to be promoted as an actual strategy to limit births to teens (rather than just being something that families go to as a last resort) then they fear that it will meet more public opposition.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Understanding Liberals’ extreme and uncompromising commitment to abortion rights and also the state’s license in giving aborificents to teenage girls helps us understand leftism, to which there is more than meets the eye.
It aint just about “women’s rights.” The professional left is Stalinist in its ruthless intelligence — ladies’ interests are little more than PR to them.
The Left has an interest in managing non-white population numbers, and this is why to them abortion rights and related services are the one and only political non-negotiable.
What are the implications of this, if my reasoning is correct?
I don’t think they have an interest in managing non-white population numbers. I think this is just one of those knee-jerk reaction policy positions. The anti-natalism of the left is nothing but “Right-wingers are wrong so we will be exactly diametrically opposed to their policies regardless of how obviously insane we sound.” It doesn’t help with the historically pro-natalist position of Christianity triggering the left-wing reflexes extra hard.
Not that the right’s own pro-natalism isn’t absurd in itself. I mean supposing we got a strong condemnation of abortion in the courts and the ‘Culture of Life’ reigned in America I can imagine we’d be seeing strong pushes against masturbation on natalist/Onanism grounds (never spill that seed, it could be a baby!) while the left would go hard in the other direction about how everyone who has the fine motor skill to do so by the age of 4 should be masturbating every 2 hours.
Meanwhile virtually no one agrees with either position very strongly just like with abortion.
Ready availability of contraception and abortion is also dog whistle politics for keeping the black population down. I suspect that whites have a lower teen birth rate than blacks.
The studies show abstinence education is no more effective than regular sex education which liberals always seem to take as a victory when it really shows that sex education doesn’t work that well. Megan Mcardle has covered this a few times.
the liberal mindset is hateful. you have to grasp what it is about sex ed that makes it so attractive to the leftie sensibility. they don’t give a flying fuck if it “works” or not. after all, teen pregnancy and birth rates were a lot lower in 195os America when sex ed was nowhere to be found in the high school halls (or kindergarten classrooms).
it’s primarily about humiliation. the coercive imposition of sex ed on “those white male rubes” is meant to humiliate them. the mockery of them when they don’t accept their medicine is meant as an exercise in humiliation. this is a war and clear victory won’t happen until, i fear, another round of bloodshed commences.
beyond humiliation, sex ed serves the liberals’ purpose of indoctrination. so much feminist and equalist pap can be streamed into the immature mind through gateways like sex ed. once planted, the seed germinates until conformist compulsions take over and high status becomes associated with leftie groupthink. girls cleave to it, and boys follow.
there is an underlying subconscious current that PA mentions, the unspoken expectation that contraceptives, wether the actual kind or the pedantic kind, will cull the minority and low class white herd. this is the hope that dare not expose itself, so don’t bother confronting a liberal about his deepest darkest beliefs. he has already spent a lifetime denying to himself these wicked motivations, so denying it to you will be as easy to him as shitting out a plate of bean sprout tofu.
Heartiste:
I don’t think sex ed is about humiliating white men; it’s about norming sex as “normal” and “healthy.” Which we all know are code words for, “I can suck and fuck as many (alpha) men as I want and you can’t call me a slut.” Liberals, primarily women, are so passionate about sex ed because it further undermines traditional mores of sexuality by which women were motivated to remain chaste and not be able to pursue alpha carousel riding.
[Related: abortion is so that women can "undo" or avoid the horror of getting knocked up by a beta.]
Having sex which produces children you don’t have the ability to take care of or have no interest in taking care of are signs of poor character. People shouldn’t have to be told that. In some communities, it’s no big deal. Some communites are removed from basic life considerations for their children like jobs, food, crime level, pollution etc. They will have children regardless if there are jobs or food available, crime or pollution are high etc. The American white population which does next to nothing to stop this demographic change are in for a nightmare because Asians, blacks and Latinos have children beyond there own capacity to give them jobs, food, clean environment etc. Non-white people are being propped up by white people through consumerism, taxation, investment or charity. There is a growing non-white population that is unemployeed or unemployable. They have a lot of time on their hands and they will stew over their envy and resentment of white people. It will manifest in increasingly larger displays of violence against white people.
Lower birth rates, lower levels of sexual satisfaction despite greater access to premarital sex and sex aids of all kinds but thank god there is access to sex Ed and sure fire birth control! Maybe critics were wrong regarding the severance of procreation and sex. Nah couldn’t be.
Most of the world hasn’t bought into the whole self suicide, anihilation, loathing that grips western white people. That includes blacks who have returned to the matriarchal society from whence they came. Why would blacks not begin breeding when their average life span and early menarche suggest procreating at an early age? When can we stop pretending that people from different places and different relatives can expect the same life outcomes? Sex Ed is not a factor. Btw Chuck, I’m glad you can get some satisfaction engaging people like Mancunt. She is fucking worthless.
What kills me is, WE are the ones who always get called racists. But if you think that education is the only solution to teenage pregnancies, then you’d have to think that black people are just so fucking stupid they don’t KNOW that having sex can get you pregnant. I don’t think even the most ardent HBDer would ever claim that. They’d say something about impulse control or carelessness or a culture that doesn’t frown upon teen pregnancy, but none of us would think black people simply don’t know how babies are made. In 2012, if you don’t know that by the time you hit puberty, wouldn’t you have to be at least borderline retarded? But that’s what they seem to be saying.
And it’s not like people in the sticks don’t watch five or six hours of TV a day. So the idea that they just don’t know about birth control is pretty ludicrous.
Who are you people? The comments on this blog are so mental, I am now addicted and cannot stop reading!
Note in response to all of you- I think you will find it’s a little more complicated than that.