Religion spurs Poverty in the South

Last week while I was working at the CDC, the Annie E. Casey Foundation released their latest KIDS COUNT report for 2007. This data set is often used by researchers as a pretty accurate assessment of data related to the health of minors. When I worked in poverty research at UGA, we used KIDS COUNT data all the time.

What is so troubling about this latest data set is the graph for teen birth rate. Teen birth rate is defined as the pregnancy of a female between the ages of 15 and 19. The numbers for the 2007 report are actually from 2004, as those are the most current numbers available.

With 63 births per 1,000 among females aged 15-19, the state with the highest teen birth rate is... TEXAS! This is horrible!

Some reasons for this outcome:

REASON 1: Texas has a large Latino population. According to AECF, the teen birth rate among Latinos (83 births per 1,000 females ages 15 to 19) is more than twice the national average (41 births per 1,000 females ages 15 to 19).

REASON 2: Texas does not require schools to teach sex ed, but if they do they are required to teach abstinence until marriage. This is a direct effect of legislators allowing religious preferences to interfere with their responsibility (both ethically and morally) to promote sound public health policy.

In other words, I feel religion is a primary cause for Texas' newest place atop the teen birth rate rankings. State legislators have allowed religion to cloud their minds, preventing sound legislation. What sense does it make to teach abstinence-only when you already know that Texas teens are having sex? Shouldn't we be more concerned at this point with making sure they are having safe sex?

Take a look at the map of the rankings and you will see that Texas is not alone. In fact, the top 10 states for teen birth rate are all located in the Bible Belt (states colored navy blue). Many of these states don't require sex ed (Texas-1, Mississippi-2, Arkansas-4, Arizona-5, Oklahoma-6, Louisiana-7, South Carolina-10, Alabama-11). However, almost all of these states require the teaching of abstinence if sex ed is taught (with the exception of Arkansas-4, South Carolina-10, and Nevada-12).

Only 6 of the top 14 states (all with a teen birth rate at higher than 20% of the national average) require the teaching of contraceptive use (New Mexico-3, Georgia-8, Tennessee-9, Nevada-12, North Carolina-13, and Kentucky-14)... that's less than half! By comparison, 5 of the 7 states in the next lowest category (states with a teen birth rate at 20% of the national average) require the teaching of contraceptive use (Florida-15, Kansas-16, Missouri-17, Illinois-18, and West Virginia-21).

Some people may say, what's the big deal? Well aside from the fact that we have a lot of teenage women pregnant, teenage pregnancy has a direct correlation to a life of poverty. According to AECF...

The consequence of starting out life as the child of a teen mother can be illustrated by the following stark comparison. The poverty rate for children born to teenage mothers who have never married and who did not graduate from high school is 78 percent. On the other hand, the poverty rate for children born to women over age 20 who are currently married and did graduate from high school is 9 percent.

What's the solution? Well, it's simple really. As a society, we have to get away from trying to infuse church doctrine into state policy. If we were all Christians, it'd be easy to have a theocracy and decry premarital sex. However, we are not all Christians, but we are all children of God. God preaches love of one another and tolerance of dissenting viewpoints. We should give our children all the options and allow them to work within their families and personal faith to figure out which is the best choice for them.

Until we do that, we're just shooting ourselves in the foot.