DHHS: adults should be abstinent too

A recent clarification of the Department of Health and Human Services abstinence-only program will provide funding for states to extend such programs to adults as old as 29. The target, says the department's spokesperson, is the high proportion of unwed mothers in that age group:

Government data released last month show that 998,262 births in 2004 were to unmarried women 19-29, the ages with the most births to unmarried women.

"The message is 'It's better to wait until you're married to bear or father children,' " Horn said. "The only 100% effective way of getting there is abstinence."

Hmm. That may be true. But, given that the National Center for Health Statistics says well over 90% of adults ages 20-29 have had sexual intercourse, I'm thinking an abstinence-only message will be a bit less than 100% effective in preventing all those births.

What's really going on here, though? Why does the government feel compelled to fight the unwed birthrate? Is it really out of control?

Well, unwed fertility is on the rise, but it turns out that it isn't necessarily the result of more premarital sex:

Since 1969, however, shotgun marriage has gradually disappeared (see table 1). For whites, in particular, the shotgun marriage rate began its decline at almost the same time as the reproductive technology shock. And the disappearance of shotgun marriages has contributed heavily to the rise in the out-of-wedlock birth rate for both white and black women. In fact, about 75 percent of the increase in the white out-of-wedlock first-birth rate, and about 60 percent of the black increase, between 1965 and 1990 is directly attributable to the decline in shotgun marriages. If the shotgun marriage rate had remained steady from 1965 to 1990, white out-of-wedlock births would have risen only 25 percent as much as they have. Black out-of-wedlock births would have increased only 40 percent as much.

It seems that the marriage rate is what's really more to blame here. But I guess that's not as attractive a problem as dirty, dirty sex.