In January, Olga Craig wrote an op-ed for the Daily Telegraph favorably comparing the declining rate of teen pregnancies in the United States with the rate in Great Britain, which has the highest teen pregnancy rate of any country in Europe. But in doing so, Craig left readers with a distorted view of the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of the two countries at preventing teen births.
Craig argues that the U.S. rate is declining due to the recent emphasis by the Bush administration on abstinence, whereas the British rate is as high as it is, she maintains, because Great Britain has gone the opposite route of “dishing out condoms and morning-after pills, making sex education compulsory in secondary schools, and inundating our teenagers with explicit information on sex.”
According to Craig,
In the past decade the number of teenage pregnancies in America has decreased by 30 percent, with the past year’s statistics indicating a historic low of just 43 births per 1,000 teenage girls.
. . .
For the past 12 years Britain has been the pregnancy capital of Europe. According to Unicef’s figures, in 2002 some 41,966 British girls under 18 became pregnant. Of those, 5954 were 15; 2,011 were 14, and 450 were under 14.
Anytime someone talks about per-capita rates for one country and just gives absolute numbers for the second country, the odds are very high that the intent is to deceive and such is true in this case.
What Craig conveniently leaves out is that Great Britain’s teen pregnancy rate is significantly lower than that of the United States. Most estimates put the UK teen pregnancy rate in the low 30s per 1,000 teenage girls.
In addition, while Craig is correct that Great Britain’s teen pregnancy rate has risen over the last 12 years, she fails to note that most studies of teen pregnancy in the UK show the rate has declined over the past several years.
Why do Great Britain and the United States have such high rates of teen pregnancies for developed countries? Both countries face similar issues with ethnic makeup, immigration and poverty that are fundamentally different from what other developed nations face.
Source:
No sex please . . . Olga Craig, The Telegraph (London), January 11, 2004.
The Dishonest Comparison of Great Britain and U.S. Teen Pregnancy Rates by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.