Teens Are Loving the Morning-After Pill

Teens are simple creatures. Teens love a few things. Teens love: social media platforms so new they’re invisible to the naked eye of an adult; experimenting with mood-altering substances; cheap hair dye; trolling; and also the morning-after pill.

The AP reports on new numbers from the CDC. Over the last ten years, as the morning-after pill has been made more widely available to prescription-less teens, their use has jumped from one in twelve to one in five. Bill Albert of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy said that “teens, like adults, often are not very good at contraception,” and that “In the battle between sex and sex with contraception, sex often wins.” Hence the morning-after pill’s popularity. Well, Bill, you know how it is.

But teens are not actually having more sex. They’re just not getting knocked up:

One of the report’s main findings has been the proportion of teens who said they’ve had sex. Those figures steadily fell from the late 1980s until the early 2000s — a decrease commonly attributed to improved sex education and greater concern by teens about AIDS and other sexually spread diseases.

Experts believe a decline in teen sexual activity and better contraception use have driven an astounding drop in teen birth rates since 1991.

But the decrease in teen sex leveled off about a decade ago, at about 45 percent for both boys and girls, and there was no change in the latest report. In 1988, it was 60 percent for boys and 51 percent for girls.

Anybody who wants to get those numbers to zero should probably consider devoting their time to something slightly less futile, like digging holes and then filling them back up immediately, over and over again, forever.