Earlier this month, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a new policy statement on sexuality, contraception and the media. It emphasized that the United States has the highest teen pregnancy rates in the Western World, and that adolescents have among the highest rates of sexually transmitted infections of any age group. It reviewed the studies on the relationship between the availability of contraception and sexual activity, denouncing what it termed the "dangerous myth" that giving teens access to birth control will make them sexually active at younger ages. What is it did not discuss is the ironic role of the "wait until marriage" efforts in driving up the rates of single parenthood.
The college educated middle class, which has deferred marriage until their late twenties and beyond, has no illusions about the prospects for abstinence through the completion of graduate school. Yet it has successfully held the line on single parenthood, with non-marital birthrates that have fallen during a period in which they have risen for the everyone else. Moral values advocates, who preach abstinence, oppose abortion, fight the greater availability of contraception, and promote marriage, decry the rise of the country's non-marital birth to 40%. But the group most likely to espouse these values, whites who begin families in their early twenties and traditionalists of all races, have seen their divorce and non-marital birth rates continue to increase. What explains the irony? We believe it is the failure to think about alternatives when abstinence fails.
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