Conservative Religion States Have Higher Teenage Pregnancy Rates

More religion evidently means more teen pregnancy, according to results from a new study. Results from this study that will be published in Reproductive Health show that those states in the U.S. that tend to swing more towards conservative religious beliefs have also tended towards higher teenage pregnancy rates. Researchers on this study feel this could be due to some religions prohibiting the use of contraception coupled with the fact that there is no campaign that successfully discourages teens from having sex in the first place.

According to the study, Mississippi was number one of the list for being both a) a conservative religious state and b) having a very high teenage pregnancy rate. The study focused merely on data gathered from all the states about religion and pregnancy statistics, thus, there was no scientific evidence gathered that could discuss why this phenomenon occurs. One of the researchers, Joseph Strayhorn, from the Drexel University College of Medicine, stated, “We conjecture that religious communities in the U.S. are more successful in discouraging the use of contraception among their teenagers than they are in discouraging sexual intercourse itself.”

There are some additional areas of the study that did not get researched. For example, there was no scientific link between teenage pregnancy rates and other more liberal religious practices. In addition, the study simply focused on gathering data about pregnancy and religion from the states but this does not point to whether any specific teenagers, who may or may not be religious, would be more likely to become teenage parents. Amy Adamczyk, a sociologist from the City University of New York who is not affiliated with this research, states, “You can’t talk about individuals, because you don’t know what’s producing the [teen birth] rate. Are there just a couple of really precocious religious teenagers who are running around and getting pregnant and having all of these babies, but that’s not the norm?”

Strayhorn understands Adamczyk’s questions and states, “It is possible that an anti-contraception attitude could be caused by religious cultures and that could exert its effect mainly on the non-religious individuals in the culture. We don’t know.” Data for the religious portion of the study was gleaned from the U.S. Religious Landscapes Survey that took place in 2007 and surveyed close to 36,000 participants. The teenage pregnancy data came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One supporter of the study’s findings includes John Santelli from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia Univeristy. He feels that the results gathered from the study were expected, “The index of religiosity is tapping into more fundamentalist religious belief. I’m sure there are parts of New England that have very low teen birth rates, which have pretty high religious participation, but they’re probably less conservative, less fundamentalist type of congregations.”

The ten states that showed the highest teenage pregnancy rates include Mississippi, New Mexico, Texas, Arkansas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Nevada, Tennessee, Kentucky and Georgia. The ten states that are considered to be the most conservative, religion-wise, are Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana, Utah, Arkansas, North Carolina, Kentucky and Oklahoma.