Researchers believe this may be due to a two-fold problem: The lack of support in these communities for the use of contraception, and the inability to successfully discourage teen sex.
"We conjecture that religious communities in the U.S. are more successful in discouraging the use of contraception among their teenagers than they are in discouraging sexual intercourse itself,” study researcher John Strayhorn said.
In other words, Bristol Palin’s to be exact, if the goal is to keep teenagers from having babies by keeping them from having sex at all, it’s not working.
Abstinence "is not realistic at all", the Alaskan teenager told Fox News in an interview earlier this year, when her son was two months old.
Does this mean that all deeply religious communities will always have more teenage births? Not necessarily.
"I'm sure there are parts of New England that have very low teen birth rates, which have pretty high religious participation, but they're probably less conservative, less fundamentalist type of congregations," said John Santelli of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
Do you think abstinence is an effective way to keep teens from having sex? Did you practice abstinence when you were younger? Do you expect your kids to?
[Editor's note: an earlier version of this article misstated the States in which conservative religious beliefs correlate to those with a higher rate of teens giving birth. It has been corrected.]
