Choose your failings carefully: It’s old news that the teen birth rate is much higher in more conservative US states, but a new study gets rid of some of the confounders like income and abortion rates in those states, and finds that the correlation is still there. “If we may speculate on the most probable explanation, we conjecture that religious communities in the US are more successful in discouraging the use of contraception among their teenagers than they are in discouraging sexual intercourse itself,” one of the authors is quoted as saying.
From Ars Technica, which has some other good extracts.