Is the Oven half full?

From today's headlines: Teen Pregnancy Up!

Of course, the better way to say this is that teen pregnancy rates in the United States fell for an astonishing 15 straight years, before rising slightly. However, I have no doubt that somewhere somebody's blood pressure is rising over today's troubled youth.

The headline news plays well to activists and Sunday School teachers who prefer to take a dim view of the rising generation. (Just like the well-documented emphasis on negative economic news over the last 7 years, even at times when by all (uh, informed) accounts the economic news was actually good.) Notably, teen pregnancy rates rose dramatically beginning in the 1970s and peaked 1991, before the recent, protracted decline.

Of course, even the 1991 rate did not approach the 20th-century peak in teen pregnancy in the 1950s. (Your grandma didn't tell you that, did she? And it certainly wasn't on Leave it to Beaver.)

I would say that despite all of the disintegration (tongue-in-cheek) of the moral fabric of society under the influence of TV shows like Murphy Brown (gasp!) and now movies like Juno and Knocked Up, today's kids are doing pretty well. Young women reach menarche 3-4 years yearlier than at the turn of the century, and get pregnant as teens at lower rates than their mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers. Not too shabby. But there WAS a rise this year. Shame, shame.

Arguably, the 1950s problem was only having crummy entertainment options like, uh, the radio and, um, Leave it Beaver (leaving it up to, well, never mind) that made kids go for switch blades, hot rods and high teen birth rates. Maybe if they had more entertaining TV and movies the moral fabric of society wouldn't have been so, er, loose.

In other news, rates of sexual activity among teenagers stayed at roughly the same level as . . . they've been for the last 200 years. But don't tell your Grandma that either.

Of course, the USA (being the backwoods cousins of the enlightened North) has a much higher teen pregnancy rate than most other "rich countries" (you know, Denmark, Sweden, Japan, etc.) according to a recent UN Report. That report points out the correlation of teen pregnancy with poverty rates and the US's embarrasingly high rates of poverty and disproporionate levels of teen pregnancy among its growing poor population. So we're still pretty degenerate and embarrassing to the other Northern Nations--but that's nothing new. We've been both of those things ever since the Mayflower set sail.