Why Evangelical Teens Get Knocked Up

When Bristol Palin's pregnancy surfaced, liberals figured that her mother's conservative base would react with outrage. Instead it embraced her. Margaret Talbot examines teenage evangelical pregnancy in a must-read piece in The New Yorker. Unlike blue states, where premarital intercourse and contraception are tolerated but teenage pregnancy is stigmatized, "red states' generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant." Seventy-four percent of white evangelical adolescents do not believe in sex before marriage, and yet they are more sexually active than teenagers of all other religious groups except black Protestants.