Swell

Our old friends at the Guttmacher Institute: Following Decade-Long Decline, US Teen Pregnancy Rate Increases as Both Births and Abortions Rise.

For the first time in more than a decade, the nation's teen pregnancy rate rose 3% in 2006, reflecting increases in teen birth and abortion rates of 4% and 1%, respectively.

These new data from the Guttmacher Institute [pdf] are especially noteworthy because they provide the first documentation of what experts have suspected for several years, based on trends in teens' contraceptive use—that the overall teen pregnancy rate would increase in the mid-2000s following steep declines in the 1990s and a subsequent plateau in the early 2000s. The significant drop in teen pregnancy rates in the 1990s was overwhelmingly the result of more and better use of contraceptives among sexually active teens. However, this decline started to stall out in the early 2000s, at the same time that sex education programs aimed exclusively at promoting abstinence—and prohibited by law from discussing the benefits of contraception—became increasingly widespread and teens' use of contraceptives declined.

"After more than a decade of progress, this reversal is deeply troubling," says Heather Boonstra, Guttmacher Institute senior public policy associate. "It coincides with an increase in rigid abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, which received major funding boosts under the Bush administration. A strong body of research shows that these programs do not work. Fortunately, the heyday of this failed experiment has come to an end with the enactment of a new teen pregnancy prevention initiative that ensures that programs will be age-appropriate, medically accurate and, most importantly, based on research demonstrating their effectiveness."

Teenage mothers are disproportionately likely to be impoverished, and to stay impoverished. This is why undiluted support for comprehensive and fact-based sex education in public schools is necessary. It's why support for SCHIP is necessary. It's also, however, why healthcare reform that restricts poor women's access to abortion is crap. And why tax credits for the middle class, for which poor women don't qualify, are crap. And why spending freezes that target education and social programs are crap.

Solving the problems Bush created is about more than cutting spending and offering entitlements. It's about cutting spending wisely and offering entitlements without restrictive caveats, so that the people hurt by Bush's policies get the help they need, directly.

When you're on the bottom rung, trickle-down economics looks exactly the same whether it's supposed to trickle down from the upper class or the middle class.

Just sayin'.