UK Drop in teenage pregancies is the success story of our time.

[SummerRain]

I thought this article was interesting, both in it's own right, but also because of what it had to say about the way the media/etc misrepresents issues, and the public's awareness of them:

Here are the facts: since 1998, the proportion of pregnancies in under-18s has fallen by a remarkable 34%, to 30.9 per thousand. Until then the number had been rising since the late 1960s. But here's what people wrongly think: Ipsos Mori says people think 25 times more under-16s get pregnant than really do...Most people (80%) think teen pregnancy is still rising.

... An election document called Labour's Two Nations claimed that a staggering 54% of 15- to 17-year-olds in the most deprived areas were getting pregnant. The real figure was 5.4%. When caught out, they said it was an errant decimal point – but that figure was repeated three times without anyone at Tory head office stopping to wonder whether it could possibly be right. That suggested deep ignorance of life in the large parts of Britain they don't represent, distant "bad lands" of their worst imaginings. At that time Chris Grayling was called out by the UK Statistics Authority for his misleading use of figures to try to claim violent crime was rising, when it had been falling for years – and still is. But ignorance is the right's friend, bogus figures bolstering wrong public estimates of benefit fraud (24%; real figure 0.7%) or numbers of black and Asian people, (a third, real number 11%). When people talk of "single mothers" they imagine girls, like the "young ladies" Peter Lilley mocked in the horrible "little list" he once sang to the Conservative party conference, about teenagers getting pregnant to get a council flat. In real life, the average age of single mothers is 38.

 

[Moll Flanders]

Good news. I hope the trend continues in that way.

That article reinforces something I was reading recently about the average age at which teens first have sex and I was surprised to see that it was still at 16 as I was under the impression that most teens would be having sex younger than that.