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From: wex@ittvax.UUCP (Alan Wexelblat)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Birth control and education
Message-ID: <885@ittvax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 27-Jul-83 09:36:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: ittvax.885
Posted: Wed Jul 27 09:36:31 1983
Date-Received: Wed, 27-Jul-83 21:26:10 EDT
References: ihlpf.174, <5590@unc.UUCP> umcp-cs.1171
Lines: 19

Liz Allen has made the claim that as sex education has spread, teenage
pregnancies have gone up, thus implying a correlation between the two.

Well, incidents of cancer have increased dramatically in the last few years.
Can we therefore infer that sex ed causes cancer?  Of course not.

I would like to see Ms. Allen's statistics.  Even if this is the case, it 
seems to me that the increase in pregnancies might be attributable to any
number of other factors (increasing poverty, rising cost of medical care--
at the moment the Pill costs ~$10/month, and is going up at about $.50 cents
per month [in the Philadelphia area], improper use of birth control).

The point is that one cannot simply say "There are more teenage pregnancies,"
and use that as an excuse to keep teens in ignorance.  Beleive me (I've recently
finished that stage in life), the adage about 'If they don`t learn it in the
classroom they`ll learn it on the street' is true.

--Alan Wexelblat
decvax!ittvax!wex