But pregnancy doesn’t:

The Centers for Disease Control released a new report today that found that Mississippi “now has the nation’s highest teen pregnancy rate, displacing Texas and New Mexico for that lamentable title.” The report found that in 2006, the Mississippi teen pregnancy rate was over 60 percent higher than the national average and increased 13 percent since the year before.

Why might that be? Maybe because Mississippi focuses heavily on abstinence:

A reporter for ABC News’s Jackson, MS affiliate explained, “The Mississippi Department of Human Services says abstinence is the only birth control that is 100 percent effective. And that’s the only message teens need to hear.”

One of the fundamental disconnects of our society is the fact that the moral thing isn’t always the effective thing. We may think abstinence education the (only?) moral type of sex education.

But what happens when the “moral” approach ultimately makes the underlying problems worse?