Census data from 2000,2005,2008 showing significant negative linear regressions between recorded abortion rate (N per 1000 women) and teen birth rate (% of total births to women < 20 years old) by US state (N=50).
  All three years are significant – where there are lots of abortions, there are fewer teen births. Where lots of teen births, fewer abortions.
  Remember: it's not casuality. It's not explaining anywhere near everything (the correlation explains 9-10% of the variation). AND The correlation is not very robust: if you include DC (I did not), where both abortions and teen births are crazy high (relatively speaking), only 2008 still shows significance (p<0.05).

Discuss.

-abs is pretty sure he’s right about the disease, he’s less sure about the spelling of it

And not in that order.

Thankfully CONSERVATIVES would never do such a thing.

Thanks for missing the point, though.

I absolutely agree that a utilitarian, empirically-honed propaganda campaign would be an excellent approach.  That’s precisely why it’s worth using respect, tact, and understanding when you’re approaching people with whom you strongly disagree – because hearts and minds are rarely won in a conversation that starts with telling people that they’re ignorant assholes who just want to keep their women-folk barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen. (i.e. “high teen pregnancy rates are actually an indicator that the program has been spectacularly successful”).

I worry when I see a siege mentality coming out.  I used to be pretty religious, and a major part of what helped me to get away from that was meeting and becoming friends with non-religious people who were able to express and defend their views without being insulting.  A great way to encourage people to remain strongly religious is for the people who don’t  share their beliefs to tell them how stupid their faith is.

Thanks for engaging in the same level of reasoning as people who blame it on the higher level of blacks and Hispanics in those states.

We don’t have sex ed in Texas schools…I think that could possibly connected to  our high teen pregnancy rate…(sarcasm alert)

http://www.statemaster.com/graph/hea_abo_rat-health-abortion-rate

Those numbers are old but I don’t have time to make a graph of all the current numbers.  However, you can look through the numbers here:

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/index.html#US

and see it is still a typical trend that blue states have higher abortion rates.

The difference is that in the conservative states, the middle class votes Republican and is religious (and the upper class extremely so), whereas in the liberal states the slope of the line is lower and the middle class votes Democratic and is less religious than the middle class in conservative states.

There’s a lot of Simpson’s Paradox going on when you compare states.