While teen pregnancy has declined in the United States, Texas has had the slowest rate of decline. In a typical year, 35,000 Texan teenagers and women under 20 get pregnant. While some states have addressed the problem of unplanned teen pregnancies by education and social services support, Texas has taken a different approach. Most Texas schools offer either no sex education or abstinence only sex education. While many states offer contraception counselling to teen mothers, Texas generally does not. Texas also has restrictive policies regarding contraception for teenagers, although the evidence shows access to contraception reduces unplanned pregnancies (and also abortions). Despite the evidence linking Texas’ approach with teen pregnancy, the view of many social conservatives is that abstinence only education is the best approach. But is it?

Looked at in the context of reducing unplanned teen pregnancies, Texas’ abstinence only (or no sex education at all) approach is not the best. To use the obvious analogy, it is as if Texas was trying to reduce automobile accidents, injuries and fatalities involving teenagers by offering them either no driver education or driver education that says not to drive or get in cars. Texas is also doing the equivalent of trying to ensure teens who do get in cars do so without access to seat belts, air bags and other safety equipment. This all assumes that the best approach is defined in terms of reducing unplanned teen pregnancies just as the best approach to automobile accidents would be defined in terms of preventing them. But there are other ways to assess what is best.

One alternative is to pick the morally best. Some conservatives claim premarital sex is morally wrong. On this view, Texas is taking the right approach because unmarried teenagers should be practicing abstinence and enabling them to understand and access birth control would contribute to their immoral deeds. To use an analogy, consider murder. Since murder is wrong, schools should teach an abstinence only approach to murder and not enable people easy access to implements of murder. Except, obviously, guns.

One reply to this approach that the moral righteousness of those who deny teenagers proper sex education and access to contraceptives comes at the cost of harming the teenagers and society. Allowing this harm to occur to others so one can impose their own values is morally unacceptable on utilitarian grounds.  There is also moral concern about the rights of teenagers to make their own informed choices about consensual sexual behavior. The imposition of the values of the social conservatives denies them this right and infringes on their freedom. Naturally, those who value abstinence and oppose contraception are free to act on this view themselves. They have the right to not engage in sex or to not use contraception. They do not have the right to cause harm to others because of their views of sex as there seems to be no foundation for such a right. There is not a right to keep people in a state of harmful ignorance nor a right to deny people contraception.

But the Texas approach can be seen as the best approach by considering an alternative set of goals. As noted above, if the goal is reducing unwanted teen pregnancies, then the Texas approach is failing. However, it could be succeeding at other goals. One possible goal is to ensure the poor and uneducated remain that way. After all, unplanned pregnancies are most likely to occur among the poor and uneducated and they make it harder for people to rise out of poverty and achieve educational goals. Maintaining a poor and uneducated population confers significant benefits to the upper classes and meshes with some morally repugnant ideological views. Another possible goal is rooted in misogyny in that it is aimed at making it more likely that girls will get pregnant. This is a variant of the goal of maintaining an underclass; in this case the specific targets are girls and young women.

While a utilitarian case could, perhaps, be made for using these policies to help maintain the underclasses, the harms caused by them outweigh the alleged advantages. As such, policies aimed at maintaining the underclasses would seem morally wrong.

Given the above discussion, Texas’ approach to teenage pregnancy is either ineffective or immoral (or both). As such, the policies in Texas should be replaced by those that have proven effective elsewhere.