was a great read - a no-condom policy is a failed policy.

But is it possible that Gloucester High School's policy of denying students access to contraception played a role?

The truth is that nobody knows the answers and rushing to any judgment, from either side of the ideological divide, is premature at best.

Here's what we can be pretty sure of: if the "pregnancy pact" story is correct, then lack of contraception was not the issue.  That would mean they intended to get pregnant, so even if they did have access to contraception, they wouldn't have used it.

Not that we shouldn't tackle the failures of abstinence-only education, but let's not scapegoat.  Even if we follow it with a "we're not scapegoating, BUT..."

directly correlates

Correlation != causation

I don't agree with abstinence only education. It's the adult version of peek-a-boo, where if we cover our eyes, something ceases to exist. But blaming this "pact" or minor pregnancy boom on abstinence only education is as bad as blaming it on Juno (the movie, not the poster here) or Knocked Up. Don't try to twist someone else's plight to your ideals.

Instead, listen to what the girls themselves said. There was no "pact" to get pregnant. Instead, there was a pact, when several girls found themselves pregnant, to help each other out:

No. There was definitely no pact. There was a group of girls who decided that they were gonna ... they were already pregnant before they decided this. That they were gonna help each other with their kids so they could finish school and raise their kids together, to do the right thing was their decision. Not, let's get pregnant, like, as a group.

These girls decided to "do the right thing". The right thing for them was not abortion but completing their pregnancies and raising their children. Their choice. We can't know whether or not in previous years how many pregnancies there were (carried plus terminated). It's entirely possible that normally there's about this many pregnancies, but either socially mores have become more conservative (disliking abortion) or liberal (accepting unwed couples), either on the whole or in this small area. No one has even disproven the null hypothesis in this case (that this is just an odd statistical cluster) and has immediately started looking for their most ideologically convenient correlation.

Everyone loves twisting facts to their viewpoints, but we also need to be careful, since this is one of the biggest issues in life. Just to go point by point quickly:

The truth is that nobody knows the answers and rushing to any judgment, from either side of the ideological divide, is premature at best.

I agree completely...

But here's what we do know: The abstinence-only policy pushed so hard by the Bush administration and the right-wing for years doesn't work.

In 2006, the teen pregnancy rate increased by 3 percent, after steadily declining for the previous 14 years. This increase directly correlates with the increase in abstinence-only education. The teen pregnancy rate had started its decline in the early nineties, and during this time period, an increase in condom use was also reported. But since George W. Bush took office and revamped funding for abstinence-only education, the decline has slowed and recently reversed.

We don't "know" that. The teen pregnancy rate rose, condom usage fell. The correlation could be due to the plan or the fact that AIDS was in every magazine every day during the 90s. High school for me was 94-98 and, trust me, they discussed AIDS a lot. It was the big bad killer of all killers and it would've scared everyone to the point of double bagging condoms. There are a lot of factors that were in play during the 90s that have waned in the last decade, so singling any one out requires dramatic evidence of its singular culpability.

What's more, a study earlier this year found that one in four teenage girls has contracted a sexually-transmitted infection (STI).

That's a disturbing fact, but we have no idea what the trend is. The link you provided explicitly states that this is a "first of its kind" study. Whether or not abstinence only made it go up, down, reversed course... We don't know, so all we can say is that we need to educate kids better on STDs.

I agree with your title, "A Little More Science, A Little Less Hype", but that has to cut both ways. We can't claim the scientific high ground if we use every anecdote, transient correlation and lone data point to "prove" our point.

From the one girl's interview:

Well, I think that they sit there and they say that they want to make a difference and it's awful that all these kids are getting pregnant, but they don't want to do anything to help them. They won't put contraceptives in the nurse's office or anything and no kid wants to go into the store and buy them, or like, ask them mom to help them get birth control. Like, it's embarrassing. So, instead of, like, making them make the decision not to use any of them, they should be giving them out in the nurse's office so you can get it anonymously," Oliver said.

Now, I see several problems here. First of all, is the implied victimhood: "but they don't want to do anything to help them". A teen being too embarassed or lazy to buy contraceptives is not a failure of assistance on the school's part. What about those kids who are too "embarassed" to go to the nurse's office to ask for condoms? Is the school at fault until there is some anonymous condom distribution service?

Second, being too embarassed to "ask them mom to help them get birth control". It scares me that we can just bypass the implications of this and go directly to a public policy discussion. At what point does the state take on the very real and clear obligations of parenthood?

What we need isn't more or less teen education, what we need is more FAMILY education, with a focus on bringing BOTH parents and children in the loop. Teen pregnancy, for all it's woes, is just one consequence of poor teen judgement. It's MUCH more important that we strengthen the judgement of our teens, via strong parenting, than that we protect them from the consequences of this judgement.

We're not looking at a situation where the young people are structurally unable to acquire contraception. They are too "embarassed" to purchase it, or ask a parent for it, and so make concious decision to do without it. The decision is the problem, not the obstacles the decision avoids. These kids are our future world leaders, and we cannot simply bubblewrap every exposed surface, then expect them to acquire any appreciable degree of self-sufficiency.

This wasn't a case where contraception was unavailable, it was a case where it was inconvenient to acquire. It would be appalling and unfortunate if we sought to lay responsibily on any government policy.