I'd be interested to know how many of those teen pregnancies were to unmarried teens vs married teens. There may be a fairly substantial amount of married 18/19 year olds in CO having children. Although I don't advocate young marriages or young marriages with children, I think that there is a different type of support system that should be in place here. Obviously promoting abstinence to married teens isn't going to work!

Secondly, I really don't think that teens didn't use condoms because they couldn't afford them. Condoms, although not as cheap as they should be, are very affordable compared to hormonal forms of birth control (you know the ones that require medical care and are incredibly expensive without insurance). Teens are probably not using condoms because they are embarassed to purchase them, have been mislead that condoms do not protect against pregnancy/STDS or have not been taught how to use them.

I do think that we should teach our kids how to say no to sexual pressure. There is value in telling kids that having sex is not a decision to be made lightly. They *should* think about pregnancy and STDs. And they should be taught how to avoid them. They also need to be told that they have the right to say no when a partner pressures them into sex. And if/when they decide to have sex they need to know how to insist that protection is used and how to use it correctly. I have no problem with a sex ed program that encourages teens to wait until they are older to have sex as long as it still teaches them how to have sex safely.

Abstinence before marriage is only a workable solution if everyone gets married very young. How do you expect an unmarried 30 year old to stay a virgin? Telling kids to wait until marriage is stupid. Either teens will think "I may never get married so I should have sex now" or might jump into bad marriages at an early age just so that they can have sex without feeling guilty. I'm not sure that either of those is the solution we should be looking for.

I was also hoping that the article would shed some light on the "normal" working parent demographic. The ones where there might not be an option. Where both parents have to work, or the reason why one stays home is because of the burden of financing child care and how our tax code penalizes two worker families.

My company for instance always seems to rate pretty highly on the family friendly work place. I'm not sure how because our family leave policies are not very generous, our health care costs increase year over year more than our raises, and there is no on-site child care. I don't understand why our company doesn't rent out space in our partially empty building for on-site care. They would not have to run the day care, just get a good quality provider here in the building. There is absolutely no where in my downtown area for child care. My husband and I are city dwellers, but it looks like we will have to commute our future children out to a day care center in burbs and then commute back into the city to work. That's absolutely ridiculous! We looked into a way of staggering our parental leave time so that we could extend the time that our child would have a parent at home. howver, my husband's company requires that leave is taken immediately following the birth/adoption of a child. Both our companies have to staff up HR departments that are soley dedicated to explaining and monitoring parental/family leave policies. Maybe if they made those policies easier to understand they could save some money. Seriously, there are about five different charts and twenty pages on how leave, vacation, sick time must be applied and in what order and for how long.

Although I do support women who choose to opt out, and I mean the ones that really choose as opposed to the ones that feel pressured (for some reason child care costs are always subtracted from the mother's salary and that is used to determine if it's worth her while to work) or pushed out. I wonder that if women keep choosing to opt out, there won't be any critical mass left to push for flexible work environments, tax and school reforms.

From the Ny Times article the entire statistic is:

"Almost 25 million Africans are infected with the HIV virus, giving the continent the worst AIDS burden in the world. Women make up 75 percent of HIV-positive Africans aged between 15-25."

The source of the number is not annotated anywhere in the original article, but the age qualification gives a little more information. It does not seem to include people that died of AIDS or AIDS related illnesses(do men die at a higher rate than women?) 75% is still a lot higher than I expected. Does anyone else have info on that number?