Social Indicators: Family Formation and Sexuality (Part 2 of 2)

[Continued from Social Indicators: Family Formation and Sexuality (Part 2 of 2)]

Despite the decrease in teenage sexual behavior and less unprotected sexual behavior, there is a rapid increase in the rate of sexually transmitted diseases:

After declining somewhat erratically from 1975 to 1997, the rate of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) rose more than 20% between 1997 and 2003. The rate for Chlamydia rose by 28.6%. The CDC estimates one in five adolescent and adult Americans has genital herpes.

The rate of people contracting Aids, the deadliest of sexually transmitted diseases, is also not good:

After peaking in 1992, the rate of new Aids declined by almost half between 1992 and 1997. However, the rate has flattened out since then and may be poised to increase based on some assessments.

All of these statistics point to significant changes regarding family and sexuality. The recent debate on same-sex unions shows that the very ideas of marriage and family are in flux. Suppose we accept the premise that the two-parent household is the optimal circumstance for raising children and marriage the optimal circumstance for engaging in sexual behavior. In that case, the picture is not good.

While the abortion rate has declined by about 20% over the last twenty years, it is still true that one in four pregnancies ends in abortion. More than one-third of children are born to unmarried women. Some of these women no doubt go on to marry or live in stable relationships with their fathers. Still, many children born into two-parent families also experience divorce and loss of the two-parent status. (I want to be clear here that I am not saying that any particular one-parent home is a hopeless situation by any means. I am addressing public policy and what we know from looking at the aggregate.) While there is some modest good news about teen sexual behavior, the overall increase in sexually transmitted diseases is rising.

Another cultural factor related to this is the rise in the availability of pornography. The pornography industry was in retreat as recently as the early 1990s, but the rise of the internet has brought it roaring back to life. It is easily a multi-billion-dollar industry in the United States. Images and videos graphically portraying every imaginable sexual act can be accessed with a few mouse clicks by children with unfiltered internet access. Even with filtered access, children can be confronted with pornography. Chat rooms provide ready-made connections with children for sexual predators. All this is not to mention the potential desensitizing impact of pornography on significant numbers of adults in our culture. The pornography industry has surged in the last four to five years, and most social indicators like the ones above only report up to 2001-2003. It remains to be seen what impact pornography will have.

Conclusions

• Two-parent families have declined from 87.7% in 1960 to about 69% over the last decade.
• The divorce rate has remained constant at 50% since 1977.
• The percentage of births to unwed mothers has increased from 10% in 1970 to 34% in 2003.
• The percentage of births to unwed teens, after rising from 5.4% in 1970 to 9.9% in 1994, has declined to 8.2% in 2003.
• After reaching an abortion rate high of 30.4 per 100 pregnancies in 1983, the rate dropped to 24.2 in 2002.
• The percentage of unmarried nineteen-year-olds who reported having ever had sexual intercourse in 1988 and 2002 dropped from 76.5 to 70.1 for girls and from 78% to 65.2% for boys. For seventeen-year-olds, the percentage rose from 38.3% to 43.1% for girls and declined from 57.2% to 39.4%.
• After declining from a 1975 high of 1,075 cases of sexually transmitted diseases per 100,000 population to at least a forty-year low of 607 cases in 1997, the rate increased by 20% to 732 in 2003. About 1 in 5 Americans has genital herpes.
• New incidences of Aids reached a high in 1992 of 31.2 new cases per 100,000 population before dropping by half to 16 in 1997. Since then, the rate has bottomed out at 14.1 but rose to 14.9 in 2003.
• Pornography has become a multi-billion-dollar industry in less than a decade through internet marketing, creating anonymity and low cost for a rapidly growing base of consumers.

Most indicators related to family formation and sexuality suggest a significantly declining quality of life.