Gail Collins is a columnist for The New York Times. Her new book, from which this article was adapted, is As Texas Goes...: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda.

The state pushes abstinence sex education yet it has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy. So why is the rest of the country paying half a billion dollars a year to support their teen mothers? An excerpt from Gail Collins’s new book, As Texas Goes…