Leading by Example?

Newly released data show that teen pregnancy and abortion rates declined steadily from 1990 through 2000 in every state and across all racial and ethnic groups. Given the logic of Republicans who blamed Bill Clinton for increases in teenage drug use during his administration, they should be crediting him for fewer pregnancies and abortions. Perhaps the key was popularizing oral sex, although Clinton did not exactly make it look glamorous.

Comments

[Douglas Fletcher]

It's colder in North Dakota, people spend more time cuddling to warm up.

[dj of raleigh]

Aids, and the surrounding 'scared safe' attitude about sex
is my pick for the lower birth rate outside marriage,
plus the advent of bicycle riding and tight underwear .
Oh, and it could have been the abstinence message.

PS...BJ's are NOT considered SEX by many kids,
nor petting, nor kissing.

[Felonious Bill]

"BJ's are NOT considered SEX by many kids."

Really? Internville, here ah come. Kiss mah ass, Ken Starr!

[Martinizing]

But think of all those cocktail dresses sent to the cleaners.

[nobody]

And bare-assed chaps.

[Spoodge]

Republicans should also credit Clinton with bringing "insertables" to the mainstream - now everything from cigars , cucumbers, carrots, baby arms etc... are providing adequate substitution for "traditional" old school seed spreading anatomy - and if you buy the whole enchaliada - you don't even have to call it sex!!!

Clinton rulz.

[White Owl]

True, he invented the walking, talking humidor. Now if that's not progress....

[Shannon Love]

Here's the actual study if anybody is interested.

(Why do the sites of old media so seldom link to easily available source material for stories they cover? I find it really annoying having to spend 30 seconds of my valueless time to track it down.)

I always skip the front page summary and go straight to the methodology. The methodology always reveals just how much guesswork and extrapolation was required. In this particular study we see the following caveat on page 5:

"Because health department abortion statistics are incomplete or nonexistent in many states, care should be used in interpreting the teenage abortion and pregnancy data. For the states with no information on the age of women having abortions, the teenage abortion rate was estimated. Similarly, error is introduced by the assumption that teenagers have abortions out-of-state in the same proportions as older women.

Translation: "We can't really consistent measure what we really want to measure so we guess a lot. "

It bothers me how large a role that studies like this play in public debate when their conclusions are much fuzzier than people who never see the study would assume.

For example, in this study, a table on page 8 shows that North Dakota has a teen pregnancy rate 54 per 1000 while South Dakota has a rate of 42 per 1000. For two states that are nearly demographically identical that seems like a big spread. Is that just a study artifact or are the girls in South Dakota that much more fun?

[thoreau]

Shannon-

I think you mean that the girls in North Dakota are that much more fun 🙂

I'd like to know how the numbers are estimated or inferred before I criticize. For instance, as a physicist, I study some things that I can't directly measure, e.g. the number of optical modes accessible to a photon traveling through some nano-materials that I make. So I put a dye inside the materials and the amount of light that it gives off at each wavelength tells me how many modes there are at each wavelength. Or at least it provides a clue. I correlate this with other measurements to get an idea, because there's no easy way to just observe and count the number of modes available. (OK, some have done it, but it's really, really, hard. And if you only want to know the modes in pursuit of some other goal, then studying the modes the hardest way possible might not be a worthwhile.)

So I'd like to know more before I judge.

[Shannon Love]

thoreau,

Your right I transposed the numbers. It should be ND 42 and SD 54. But hell, who can tell them apart anyway?

I'm not really criticizing this particular study per se but rather the way such studies are portrayed in the media and the political debate. They are popularly treated as being much more definitive and accurate than they are based just on the methodology.

This study is actually a meta-study using information collected from 50 different states each one of which uses a different methodology to collect its information. The study itself says that some states do not even collect abortion statistics so their rates have to be inferred and in states with parental notification laws pregnancy and abortion data can be seriously skewed. That's a lot of slop. I don't really see an awareness of this uncertainty in public debate.

In your work, you will carefully delineate what measurement you actually take and what measurements are interpolations or extrapolations. If someone actually makes a decision based on your work they know what data is solid and what is inferred. That rarely happens in decisions made on data generated in the social sciences.

[brooke]

North Dakota has a strict family cap policy for its welfare recipients while South Dakota doesn't. I doubt that can explain the entire discrepency, but it surely explains some of it.