Abstinence-only Education Doesn't Work, Part II

This is a continuation of my previous post on this topic wherein I argued that abstinence-only education can't work to prevent out-of-wedlock births in our libertine culture.

The first thing detractors have to do is look at the scoreboard. Here's one part of it.

Since 1960, illegitimate births have increased more than 400 percent. In 1960, 5 percent of all births were out of wedlock. Thirty years later nearly 30 percent of all births were illegitimate.

You can claim that pregnant girls were hidden away until they had kids or that there were shotgun marriages or that people got married earlier, but you can't hope to use those tools to explain away a 4-fold increase in illegitimacy. The scoreboard doesn't lie.

Second, there are about 1,250,000 abortions per year in the US these days. The four-fold increase above does not take these into account. That means the scoreboard is much more lopsided than it looks, unless you want to make the hopeless claim that abortions were just as common back in the 1950s. Adding the abortions to the live births, it means that there are almost 8 times as many illegitimate pregnancies today as there were in 1960.

You cannot bridge that number no matter what wild assumptions you make about some kind of bizarre Underground Railroad of pregnant girls or waves of back alley abortions. Give it up. The scoreboard is more lopsided than a Detroit Lions - Indianapolis Colts game.

The inescapable conclusion is that parentally-controlled, abstinence-only education in, say, the 1950s worked far better than anything we're doing today. It's not even close. So why is that? I'd like to offer an experiment that might convince you the underlying culture is the dominant feature.

The Experiment

Immerse yourself in the culture of the 1950s for a full day. Listen to the music, watch the movies, read books about the era, whatever you'd like. Then immerse yourself in the popular youth culture of 2009 for a day. Listen to urban hip hop, watch MTV, surf MySpace and so on.

Compare the images, the ads, the themes, the underlying morality of the two eras. My bet is that in two days, you will be able to explain the difference in the statistics and do so with a deeper understanding of what they mean.

To get you in the mood, allow me to recommend some Doris Day. She was a popular actress and singer from the 1950s. On a tribute website, I counted at least 5 #1 hits and about the same number of #2 singles. Here's one of my favorites that I heard while listening to our local jazz station's Rug Cutter's Swing program a few weekends ago.

This was not one of her big hits, but I like the song and I wanted an excuse to post it on the blog. So there. Another great place to start would be to buy the Dean Martin CD, Amore. The music is fantastic and even if the experiment doesn't work, it's always a good thing to have some Dean Martin CDs in your possession.

As for books, try reading Lynne Cheney's Blue Skies, No Fences. For those lefties out there, I'm pretty sure this was the blueprint for Dick Cheney's attempts to destroy the Constitution and install a Cheney-based dictatorship. You'll need to read the whole thing to find out.

When it comes to movies, watch a Western or two or maybe some war movies. The Caine Mutiny is fantastic.

If anyone actually tries this, I'd love to hear what you find out. The scoreboard doesn't lie. Social pathologies correlate strongly to broken families and we have more now than we did then. We're far more libertine than they were. My original post claimed that libertines need to own those pathologies. If the 1950s were too repressed and you think we've got a much healthier attitude about such things, that's OK. You just need to accept that this morality has given us mammoth prison populations, more drug abuse, more child abuse and so on.

As always, comments are welcome.