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THE UNEXPLAINED DECLINE IN TEEN SEX:

23 JULY 15

According to a major new CDC study, teenagers just aren’t having as much sex any more. http://vlt.tc/20qy  “Less than half of teens older than 14 said they’ve had intercourse, a sharp drop from rates in the ’80s, a new CDC study found. The majority of those who do choose to become sexually active are using some form of protection. And, in the last decade, the popularity of the so-called “morning-after pill” among girls has more than doubled. Teen births, meanwhile, have plummeted about 57 percent over the last 30 years.

“Researchers surveyed roughly 2,000 boys and girls, 15 to 19. (They also interviewed about 1,770 young adults, 20 to 24, about their high school encounters.) The share of teen girls who reported they’ve had sex at least once dropped from 51 percent in 1988 to 44 percent in 2013, they found. Abstinence was more pronounced among the guys: 60 percent of teen boys in 1988 said they’d had sex, compared to 47 percent in 2013.” At the same time, use of the morning-after pill has soared. http://vlt.tc/20p0  “The use of emergency contraception – like the Plan B pill – for teen girls grew from 8 percent in 2002 to 22 percent in 2013.”

And as you might expect, this 25-year drop in teen sex rates have also had an impact on teen birth rates, which are now at an all-time low. http://vlt.tc/20qz  “Among teens from ages 15 to 19, the birth rate dropped 9% in 2014 to 24.2 births per 1,000 women. Since 1991, the researchers report that the birth rate for this age group has dropped 61%… The national teen pregnancy rate has also been on a record decline. Data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has shown pregnancy rates among teenagers have been consistently dropping for the last two decades, and there was a 10% drop in a year from 2012 to 2013.” Birth rates for teenagers are dropping, while birthrates for women in their thirties and forties are rising.

So what are the major takeaways from this? Why are teens having so much less sex than they used to? Wonkblog theorizes that it’s because they’re spending a lot more time on their smartphones. Or that the prevalence of the HPV vaccine – which has not, as some parents feared, lead to some new rise in sexual activity – has meant kids are getting the sex talk earlier. But neither seems to be borne out by the trendlines, which indicate this was a trend of sexual inactivity that began in the 1990s, when there were no smartphones to distract or HPV vaccine processes to educate.

My general impression is that this is just another aspect of modern risk aversion. In a period of family breakdown, when roughly 70 percent of black children, 50 percent of Hispanic children, and 30 percent of white children are born out of wedlock, the general lesson one takes is that sex is risky and dangerous, and that such activity ought to be avoided if possible. But taken as a whole, this represents another triumph of soft social conservatism over time. For all of the well-founded concern about the plight of people growing up in broken homes, the nation as a whole has fewer abortions and more responsible and restrained teenagers today than it has had for quite a long time. And that’s a good thing.

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