From the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

More than a quarter of young women today lost their virginity when they were below the legal age of consent, NHS figures reveal.

Some 27 per cent of 16 to 24 year-olds admit they were 15 or under when they had sex for the first time.

One in eight of this age group have already had sex with at least ten different partners.

[…][J]ust 4 per cent of women now aged 55 to 64 first had sex when they were under-age. This rises to 10 per cent of 45 to 54 year-olds, and 14 per cent of 35 to 44 year-olds.

[…]Norman Wells, director of the Family Education Trust said: ‘Over recent years we have witnessed the systematic removal of every restraint which in previous generations served as a disincentive to underage sexual activity.

‘Sex education in many schools has had the effect of breaking down the natural inhibitions of children with regard to sexual conduct, and the age of consent is rarely enforced, so young people no longer have any fear of legal proceedings.

‘On top of that, the ready availability of contraception means that a girl’s fear of pregnancy is no longer considered a good enough reason for rejecting her boyfriend’s advances, and confidentiality policies mean that a girl need not worry about what her parents would think about her being sexually active, obtaining contraception, being treated for a sexually transmitted infection or even having an abortion, because they don’t have to be told.’

The figures have come from a survey of the sexual behaviours of 8,420 men and women aged 16 to 69, carried out by the NHS this year for the first time.

They also reveal that one in seven women aged 16 to 24 who had lost their virginity had caught a sexually transmitted infection at least once. Only four in ten said they always used contraception when having sex.

The UK Daily Mail reports on a new study that shows that women who lose their virginity as teenagers are more likely to divorce. (H/T Dina, Mysterious C)

Excerpt:

Women who lost their virginity as young teenagers are more likely to divorce – especially if it was unwanted, according to new research.

The University of Iowa study shows that 31 per cent of women who had sex for the first time as teens divorced within five years, and 47 per cent within 10 years.

Among women who delayed sex until adulthood, 15 per cent divorced at five years, compared to 27 per cent at 10 years.

The findings were published in the April issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family.

Author Anthony Paik, associate professor of sociology in the university’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, examined the responses of 3,793 married and divorced women to the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth.

The study showed, however, that if a young woman made the choice to lose her virginity as a teenager, there was no direct link to a marital split later in life.

If the sexual act took place before the age of 16 women were shown more likely to divorce, even if it was wanted.

So what caused this explosion of premarital sex?

Excerpt:

Planned Parenthood’s anointed sex missionaries received their first federal funding in the Lyndon Johnson administration. The sort of “sex education” now pushed in Santa Fe and elsewhere started in 1968 when the National Education Association Journal called for “sex education as an integral part of school curriculum beginning in early grades.”[3] Planned Parenthood, the NEA, and herds of shrill progressives were following a behavioral pattern characteristic of the 1960s left.

An early example of the pattern emerged in the reactions to Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring scare-book, which got DDT banned and still enables the malaria deaths of about 3,000 children a day. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 Population Bomb — turned dud — warned of mass starvations unless humanity curbs its reproductive enthusiasm. Then also in 1968, the NEA Journal demanded solutions to imagined problems.

Imagined, because calls for sex education were based on “problems” that lived only in the minds of anointed ones seeking to spread agendas. “Contraception education” would allegedly reduce unwanted pregnancies and illegitimate births.[4] A “crash educational program”[5] would arrest out-of-control venereal disease, while general sex education would address “the emotionally disastrous results of irresponsible sexual behavior.”[6] The claims shared a common thread: fictitious bases.

Not only were there no disease and illegitimacy crises, but indicators were solidly improving at the time of the alarmists’ claims. As Sowell documents in The Vision of the Anointed,[7] teenage pregnancies and venereal disease declined during the 1950s and 1960s. Yet over skeptics’ protests that sex education would increase sexual behavior, Planned Parenthood and public schools forged ahead to curtail behaviors that were already fading. Sex-ed was off and running.

And results followed.

During the 1970s, pregnancies among fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds jumped 41 percent.[8] Between 1970 and 1984, abortions among unwed fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds more than doubled and birth rates jumped 29 percent.[9] By 1976, five years of data showed unmarried girls fifteen to nineteen having sex at increasing rates.[10] And not only did venereal disease not subside, but teen gonorrhea rates tripled between 1956 and 1975.[11]

In the 1950s, 13 percent of teen girls had been sexually active. By the late 90s, the figure had tripled. Premarital intercourse, approved by less than a third of women in the 1950s, was acceptable to 91 percent by the late 80s. By 2005, over two-thirds of Blacks and half of Latino high-schoolers were having intercourse, while over half of all teens fifteen to nineteen were performing oral sex. By 2006, babies born to unmarried women accounted for 37 percent of all births, [12] 70 percent among Blacks. The Black illegitimacy rate reflected a 218 percent explosion over forty-five years.

Such realities have drawn dismissive responses from sex-ed advocates. Incredibly, the horrific trends of the 1970s and 1980s were offered as reason for more sex education.[13] Yet amid cover-ups and excuses, the sex-ed crowd’s true motives were exposed in 1978, in of all places, Congress. One committee report noted that despite sex education’s stated objective of reducing teen pregnancies and sexually-transmitted disease, the real goal “of most sex educators appears to be encouragement of healthy attitudes about sex and sexuality.”

When I hear about things like this I think about the statistics that how that relationship stability is directly correlated to the number of pre-marital sexual partners. The more pre-marital sexual partners you have, the less like that your marriage will last. Those are the facts. And my concern is for the children who are being born from these women who will not have a stable development to grow up in, with a mother when they’re young, and a father as they grow older.

Why does the left push premarital sex even when we know that it undermines marriage? Two reasons. First, they oppose marriage because it traditionally implies different sex roles – men work, women stay home. Feminists on the left want women to work like men work. They don’t want women to aspire to marriage and family. Second, the left thinks that the best way to stop people from having feelings of shame and guilt when they have premarital sex is to encourage everyone to do it. They want to normalize it.

The way that the left deals with the skyrocketing numbers of teen pregnancies and sexually-transmitted infections that result from this policy is to double down with more sex education, free abortions and more government spending on social programs, followed by tax hikes to pay for all the lifestyle-outcome-equalizing. And then, of course, fewer working men can afford to marry because of those tax rates, and fewer women can afford to stay home and raise their young children.

After all, the left things that there’s no social problem in the world that can’t be fixed by a little more government intervention and public school indoctrination. If worse comes to worse and the health care costs costs increase, we can just make health care “free” by nationalizing it to completely separate behaviors from consequences. That should get rid of the problem, because if you make getting sick free, people will stop getting sick. And if all of these broken homes create children who commit criminal acts, we can always ban guns. That should get rid of the crime problem, because if you make it impossible for law abiding people to defend themselves, then criminals will stop committing crimes. That’s how the left thinks. Or rather – that’s how the left feels.