Penna Dexter

A survey recently released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveals that, over the past decade, the number of high-school-age teens who are engaging in sex has dropped dramatically with especially pronounced declines in the past two years.

The report’s authors are particularly encouraged by the steep fall in the rate of sexual activity among ninth and tenth graders and also among black and Hispanic teens.

In 2015, 41.2 percent of high school students surveyed reported ever having had sexual intercourse — down from 46.8 percent two years earlier. This was a dramatic extension of a gradual drop since 2005.

Planned Parenthood sex educators have a curious explanation for this trend.

Laura Lindberg is with the Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood. She says the decline in sexual activity among ninth and tenth graders is a “welcome development,” but that it most likely results from the end of federally-funded school programs that taught abstinence until marriage. She says the drop is more likely due to the rise, during the Obama years, of programs that teach contraception.

Only the sexual revolutionaries of the Left would conclude that teaching kids to abstain from sex until marriage would result in more of them having sex, while teaching them to use contraception would result in these declining rates of teen sex.

Ms. Lindberg seemed skeptical that these ninth and tenth graders would continue their exemplary behavior. “The big takeaway for me here,” she said, “is even with the observed delay in sex, by the time they graduate high school, it’s still the case that more than half of students have had sex.”

The Left assumes young people will be sexually active and emphasizes contraceptive-based sex ed. This survey indicates that, despite switches in sex-ed philosophy and policy, more of them are learning the benefits of avoiding premarital sex. Sex educators should emphasize that those benefits extend beyond high school.