The day after we celebrated the birth of Christ the Nashua Telegraph treated us to a report that birth rates among teens had declined. If you poked around beyond the confines of the Telegraph piece you would discover that New Hampshire was one of the states leading the way. And there were some very amusing thoughts on the decline, but no one even suggested an increase in chemical or surgical abortions as a cause.
Perhaps abortion was an unsuitable topic for the local print media the day after Christmas. Or was it that the abortion lobby in New Hampshire (and in general) has gone to such great lengths to make that kind of information so impossible to gather that it could not be accurately collected? Not that the Telegraph or the media as a whole would offer due diligence on such matters and spoil the good news.
Back in October, the Union Leader posted an article on the original CDC report which I commented on here…
The (Union Leader) article discusses some reasons, but never mentions the number of teen pregnancies that do not result in live births.
I think that’s an important statistic. After all, if you wanted to get the teenage birth rate down to zero all you would have to do is abort every teen pregnancy… So claiming to have a lower birth rate is meaningless in any other social context without that data.
So where is the data? As far as I can tell the same people who have been scaring us with the specter of an unknown number of secret backroom abortions if we don’t have legalized abortion have also managed to keep the specter of front room abortions a secret as well. And good luck finding data on plan B or other chemical abortifacients, the fast easy way to make sure you never even know if you got pregnant.
I guess that explains where the abortion stats in these articles went. Someone took plan B before writing them.
I know, I sound cynical about what should be good news but when a state legislates secret abortions for underage girls from their own parents and then hides the rates of abortions performed in general, I’m not inclined to embrace the garbage the Telegraph fed us the day after Christmas as worth of anything but ridicule.
From the 12/26/10 Nashua Telegraph ‘Teen Birth Rate drop economic, cultural’ (snicker)
Experts say the recent recession, and a decline in immigration due to a weak job market, played a significant role.
The recession hurt not only the working class, but their families, including the teenagers living at home or living close to neighbors and friends impacted by job losses and company downsizing.
Some experts even credit pop culture.
With the popular MTV show “16 and Pregnant” chronicling the reality of pregnancy and early child care, teens are more directly exposed to the work and frequent stigma attached to teen pregnancy and motherhood in society.
If teenagers as a class of individuals viewed intercourse in the context of economics we would have never had a problem to begin with. And the only thing more absurd than the economic meme is that pop culture is having a positive impact.
In fact, 16 and pregnant just had their first “abortion” episode, which the feministas have been crying for since the show started. One of the girls who was on previously got pregnant again. So much for economics and pop culture. Even the cast of the program missed the magic lesson.
So both of these speculations are absurd. Economics actually points to increasing rates of pregnancy as income declines and the over-sexed media encourages the hook-up culture and abhors the idea of abstinence as an education tool at every opportunity. Congress even defunded federal support for abstinence programs in 2009 and shifted the money to contraception and abortion providers.
The Obama administration’s 2010 budget included $155 million in funding for medically accurate information about sex and eliminated spending for abstinence-only programs favored by many social conservatives who oppose the teaching of contraception to teens in U.S. schools.
One such advocate had this to say in the same article back in October about the earlier CDC report promoting the same idea…
“This new CDC report makes it crystal clear that the teen birthrate is lower in states that provide students with comprehensive, evidence-based sex education,” Leslie Kantor, National Director of Education, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement.
So the left diverted money to sex education progressives like, ‘education’ that includes abortion as an alternative to unwanted pregnancy, and we can’t get statistics on surgical and chemical abortions to measure their impact on the reported decline in births to teenage mothers.
And now we have a “report” suggesting that this is working but no data other than wild speculation with no merit. Pardon my cynicism but I am not convinced we have accomplished anything except how to hide the real reason for the “decline.”
