Hm. Fascinating New Yorker piece on sexual attitudes among the young - and how they differ in red states and blue states. In a nutshell:

Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.

Social scientists are now studying this, and finding that - among other things - “religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical. The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents—seventy-four per cent—say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage. … But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their “sexual début”—to use the festive term of social-science researchers—shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier.”

Basically, the bottom line seems to be that those who value purity most ain’t necessarily more pure.

Yet even more interesting are some of the ancilliary findings - that the states with the highest incidence of divorce tend to be red states, the lowest blue states; that the highest teen-pregnancy rates are recorded in red states, the lowest in blue states.

And on average, “people start families earlier in red states—in part because they are more inclined to deal with an unplanned pregnancy by marrying rather than by seeking an abortion.”

So this is an aspect of the abortion debate we don’t get into - but maybe should.

Because if you ban abortion entirely, as so many evangelicals want to, you will not reduce the likelihood of either teenage sex or teenage pregnancy - which remains pronounced in the most anti-abortion communities in this country.

What you will do is create a culture by which teens are more likely to give birth, more likely to get married at a tender age (like 17-year-old Bristol Palin) and ultimately more likely to divorce, and raise those kids in a broken home.

So what’s worse - abortion or consigning a generation of kids and their young parents to that fate?