"Abstinence is 100% effective in preventing pregnancy. Although many birth control methods can have high rates of success if used properly, they can fail occasionally. Practicing abstinence ensures that a girl will not become pregnant because there is no opportunity for sperm to fertilize an egg.."

"With abstinence programs and disputes over what can be taught in schools regularly making the front page, 'The Abstinence Teacher' hits on prominent social fault lines. This has become something of a hallmark for Mr. Perrotta, who has developed a knack for combining hot-button cultural themes (electoral corruption in 'Election,' mommy-and-me despair and vigilante justice in 'Little Children') with flawed and complicated characters. While his stories bear the sheen of satire, they are actually sharp though compassionate investigations of human relationships. They can also be very funny.

...Raised Roman Catholic (he has since lapsed), [Tom Perrotta] was exposed to the self-abnegating form of religion that the evangelicals, he said, had turned on its head, particularly in regard to sex. 'Catholic theology is that sex should be for procreation,' he said. 'But this evangelical culture really embraces [...] and pleasure. I was really interested in that strain of Christianity that didn't want to fight American culture and that's a vibrant, prosperous and actually kind of sexy culture.'

...But Mr. Perrotta said he purposely did not take what he called the Tom Wolfe immersion approach to researching the novel. Instead he wanted to learn just enough to make the novel plausible.

...Over all, he said, evangelical Christian culture seems mostly polite, as well as extremely un-ironic. In response, 'a certain kind of collegiate irony is like a reflex,' Mr. Perrotta said. 'And it's a reflex of superiority and condescension. It just wells up. But when I write, I try to quiet it down.'"

Teen Pregnancy Rates Reconsidered 

Politicians looking for encouraging cultural indicators often parade the decline in U.S. teen pregnancy rates since 1990. Yet they often neglect to mention that pregnancy rates have been dropping among all women under 30 since 1990 or that teen birth rates have been declining-except for a modest up tick in the early 1990s-since 1960, reflecting a drop in birth rates across the board. But most revealing, few politicians draw attention to the more important indicator: whether these pregnancies or births are to married or unmarried teens.

According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, even as birth rates among teens are declining, the proportion of births to teens that are unmarried has shifted dramatically, increasing steadily from 15 percent to 83 percent between 1960 and 2004. Although married mothers not long ago represented the majority of teen mothers, they have been the minority since 1982. One might interpret these patterns as a double whammy: not only have birth rates declined, but also among those fewer births are dramatically more to homes without a father.

Nor is the trend limited to teens, as births to young women, ages 20-24, reflect a similar pattern. In 1960, only five percent of births in this age group were to unmarried women. And while married women represented the majority of mothers in this age group for a longer period of time, their unmarried peers eventually became the majority in 2001. In 2003, the latest year for which data are available, 53 percent of all births to women in their early 20s were outside the protective bonds of marriage.

When both age groups are put together, unmarried women under 25 years of age accounted for 62 percent of all out-of-wedlock births in 2003 (teens accounted for 24 percent while their older sisters accounted for 38 percent).

These figures suggest that the issue of teen pregnancy may be a red herring and that policy makers should instead focus on unmarried childbearing (which represented 36 percent of all births in 2004), and perhaps where that crisis is most pronounced: women in their early 20s.