teen sex trends improving

From Michael Medved at TownHall.com...

Why do so many otherwise reasonable people feel an odd compulsion to embrace the illogical and unsupportable notion of the nation's total moral collapse?

Despite irrefutable evidence of dramatically declining rates of crime, divorce, drug abuse, traffic accidents, smoking, abortion and even environmental pollution in the last twenty years, most Americans insist that the ethical state of the nation has never been worse....

Medved cites a January 27 article by Tara Parker-Pope in the New York Times-- "The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity"-- in which she largely dismisses alarmist reports of a "teen sex crisis".

Ms. Parker-Pope summarizes by saying that: "While some young people are clearly engaging in risky sexual behavior, a vast majority are not. The reality is that, in many ways, today's teenagers are more conservative about sex than previous generations."

And she puts forward a number of surprising and reassuring stats:

--From the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, more high school students, both male and female, remained virgins. In 2007, only 47.8% had ever had sex –a sharp drop from 54.1% in 1991.

--A 2002 report from the Department of Health and Human Services also showed that teenagers seemed more determined to postpone their first sexual encounters. Only 30% of 15-to-17 year old girls had experienced sex—dramatically down from 38% in 1995...the percentage of sexually experienced boys in that age group declined from 43% to 31%.

- Younger teenagers also showed significant decreases in sexual experimentation. In 1995, an alarming 20% said they had had sex before age fifteen, but by 2002 the numbers decreased to just 13% of girls (and 15% of boys).

According to Professor Kathleen A, Bogle of the sociology department at LaSalle University: "There's no doubt that the public perception is that things are getting worse, and that kids are having sex younger and are much wilder than ever before. But when you look at the data, that's not the case."

From there, Medved deals with the recent uptick in teen pregnancies, but his argument is too long to replicate here.