Sex hungry and fed lust by MTV, teens today are having more sex than ever before in U.S. history. "Sex has become so commonplace and accepted," remarks sociology professor Mark Doyle, "you find fewer and fewer teens even contemplating waiting until a mature age to have sex." From the sex iconography of Britney Spears, to the moral precident set by President Clinton, it is clear that U.S. culture has bred teens that are increasinly engaging in sex with little pause.

The above paragraph, to whatever extent its popular belief, is fictional. Teen pregnancy, since about the start of Mr. Clinton's presidency, has been on a quite suprising decline. And it's not simply a greater use of birth control. From today's Times:

The teenage pregnancy rate in America, which rose sharply between 1986 and 1991 to huge public alarm, has fallen steadily for a decade with little fanfare, to below any level previously recorded in the United States. And though pregnancy prevention efforts have long focused almost exclusively on girls, it is boys whose behavior shows the most startling changes.

More than half of all male high school students reported in 2001 that they were virgins, up from 39 percent in 1990. Among the sexually active, condom use has soared to 65 percent for all male students and 67 percent among black ones. The trends are similar, if less pronounced, for female students, who remain slightly less likely than boys to report that they have had sex. Nowhere are the changes more surprising than in poor minority neighborhoods like Harlem and the Bronx, which a decade ago were seen as centers of a national epidemic of teenage pregnancy.
Researchers often sum up the findings in one tidy phrase: "less sex, more contraception." But there is nothing simple about their puzzlement over the reasons.

Wonder why the first paragraph seems more popularly believed?