Economic Opportunity is Better than SexEd at Preventing Teen Pregnancy:

The study authors say teenagers in high-inequality areas may have kids at a young age essentially because they might as well — they may be told to wait, finish school and get a good job, but if they don’t believe they can really achieve a better life that way, they may choose to have a child instead. They write that high birthrates in high-inequality areas reflect “a decision among a set of girls to ‘drop-out’ of the economic mainstream; they choose nonmarital motherhood at a young age instead of investing in their own economic progress because they feel they have little chance of advancement.”

And Levine and Kearney argue that for many low-income teens, having a child really is to some degree a choice, not an accident. Though most teenagers say their pregnancies were unintended, another study found that 20 percent of older teens who were having unprotected sex eschewed birth control either because they wanted to get pregnant or they didn’t care. That’s ten times the number who said they couldn’t afford birth control, and the second-most common explanation for unprotected sex (the most common was the frustratingly vague response “other reason”).

Levine and Kearney also think that sex ed (abstinence-only or otherwise) has little effect on the teen birthrate. In a separate study, also published this year, they found that neither form of sex ed played any observable role in the recent drop in births to teens. Improved access to family planning services had an effect, but only a small one.

Really, they say, teen pregnancy is more of a social problem than a sexual one. And the best way to solve it isn’t to target pregnancy directly, as sex education programs try to do, but rather to improve girls’ lives as a whole. Their research doesn’t show that sex ed is useless — it may still help kids protect themselves from STDs or learn to communicate with partners. But for preventing pregnancy, says Levine, the best programs are actually those that give girls more opportunities, such as by helping them go to college.