Some very, very good news for a change
by digby
From Sarah Kliff at Vox:
The teen birthrate has plummeted rapidly since the mid-2000s — and a new study suggests better use of birth control is entirely responsible.
There are 42 percent fewer teen births now than just seven years ago. In 2007, 4.2 percent of teenage girls in the United States gave birth. In 2014, the rate was 2.4 percent.
This is an incredibly fast change in a public health trend, and it’s left some researchers puzzled over how it happened so quickly.
But researchers Laura Lindberg, John Santelli, and Sheila Desai say it’s not a mystery at all. Writing in the Journal of Adolescent Health, they find that teenage girls in 2012 were just as likely to be sexually active as girls in 2007. Survey research shows that 43 percent of girls between 15 and 19 said they’d ever had sex in 2007, compared with 45 percent in 2012.
What changed was how teenage girls used contraceptives. The percentage of sexually active teens who used at least one type of birth control the last time they had sex rose from 78 percent in 2007 to 86 percent in 2012. More teens gravitated toward better types of birth control — like pills, IUDs, or implants — rather than relying on lower-quality birth control like condoms.
This is one of those easy answers to difficult questions. Having sex is a very normal thing for adolescents. Hormones etc. Duh. But there is no reason in this modern world that young women cannot do what comes naturally without taking a risk in getting pregnant. (It could still happen, of course. No birth control is perfect. ) These statistics show that we can reduce the teen birth rate significantly, giving women better chances in life and often sparing them the need to get an abortion if only we take the practical approach to the problem instead of dealing with it as if it's a moral matter.
Not that anyone couldn't have predicted this beforehand...
Perhaps we could start taking some practical measures to reduce gun deaths too.
Nah ... what am I thinking?
Update: Unfortunately, these people aren't going away either:
Wayne Allyn Root, a Donald Trump admirer who often claims to be in frequent contact with the GOP candidate has led campaign rallies for him in Nevada, said yesterday that people who receive federal benefits such as Medicaid, welfare and food stamps should lose their right to vote, as should women who use “free contraception” under the Affordable Care Act.
Root’s plan would cut a large swath of Americans from the voter rolls: Roughly one in five Americans benefit from means-tested benefit programs, while 67 percent of women with private health insurance use copay-free contraception through the Affordable Care Act (which, by the way, is paid for by insurance companies, not by the federal government).
Root told Virginia radio host Rob Schilling yesterday that much of the energy behind Trump’s campaign, as he discusses in his new book “Angry White Male,” is that the country is “evenly divided between the makers and the takers,” so “the middle class is basically paying, paying, paying and the poor get everything free, and it’s a disaster.”
Root said that he had recently seen a map on the internet showing that if only “taxpayers” had been allowed to vote, the 2012 election would have been “a Republican sweep.”
“So if the people who payed the taxes were the only ones allowed to vote, we’d have landslide victories,” he said, “but you’re allowing people to vote. This explains everything! People with conflict of interest shouldn’t be allowed to vote. If you collect welfare, you have no right to vote. The day you get off welfare, you get your voting rights back. The reality is, why are you allowed to have this conflict of interest that you vote for the politician who wants to keep your welfare checks coming and your food stamps and your aid to dependent children and your free health care and your Medicaid, your Medicare and your Social Security and everything else?”
Root quickly amended his statement to say that receiving Social Security and Medicare shouldn’t disqualify someone from voting, but “in general most of the things I just rattled off should preclude you from voting.”
Nice save... if they don't allow older, racist white people to vote they have a big problem. Unfortunately, the world seems to create new racist white people all the time.
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