Recently, I put forth the "Iron Law of Birtherism," which simply notes that the Obama citizenship denial movement is strongest in precisely those states where Republicans poll best and health care is worst. Now, a new study again confirms red state birtherism is literal, revealing that the most faithfully religious - and Republican - states display the highest teen birth rates. As it turns out, this is just another example of social dysfunction being most pronounced where John McCain and George W. Bush did best.
The study in the upcoming issue of Reproductive Health found that:

U.S. states whose residents have more conservative religious beliefs on average tend to have higher rates of teenagers giving birth, a new study suggests.
The relationship could be due to the fact that communities with such religious beliefs (a literal interpretation of the Bible, for instance) may frown upon contraception, researchers say. If that same culture isn't successfully discouraging teen sex, the pregnancy and birth rates rise.

Following a similar study earlier this year, Mississippi topped the charts. Including the District of Columbia, 19 of the 20 states with the highest teen birth rates voted for George W. Bush in 2004, 17 for John McCain last year. Conversely, 9 of the 10 states with the lowest rates are decidedly blue.
Those numbers are consistent with a January Gallup survey of 350,000 Americans which asked, "Is religion an important part of your daily life?" With an 85% "yes" response, Mississippi again ranked #1, while the New England states led by Vermont (42%) were the least religious (and most Democratic). Overall, the results closely followed the electoral map: the GOP rules where God reigns supreme in the lives of voters.
As the study's researchers were quick to concede, their findings come with caveats:

However, the results don't say anything about cause and effect, though study researcher Joseph Strayhorn of Drexel University College of Medicine and University of Pittsburgh offers a speculation of the most probable explanation: "We conjecture that religious communities in the U.S. are more successful in discouraging the use of contraception among their teenagers than they are in discouraging sexual intercourse itself."

The Pittsburgh research, which looked at aggregate and not individual data, didn't authoritatively establish the link between religious conservatism and teenage pregnancy. (It is worth noting that "they found a strong correlation between statewide conservative religiousness and statewide teen birth rate even when they accounted for income and abortion rates.") But with the teen birth rate jumping in 26 states to produce the first national increase in 15 years, policy makers have a lot of evidence to indict the usual suspects.
While Mississippi's increase may or may not be a "statistical blip," it also suggests a cataclysmic failure of now-orthodox Republican social policies. As ThinkProgress detailed, Mississippi is a leading "hotbed of abstinence education." More disturbing, the state's draconian restrictions on abortion - including a mandatory requirement that patients must view an ultrasound image prior to receiving the procedure - have left th entire state of Mississippi with only one abortion clinic.
To be sure, partisan debate over the causes of the worrisome jump in teen births is contentious. Republicans no doubt will point to higher rates among Democratic-leaning African-Americans and Hispanics to excuse the dismal performance in their home states. Democrats will rightly point to the proven record of failure for abstinence-only education programs advocated by President Bush and GOP leaders nationwide.

And as the data consistently show, abstinence-only sex education programs simply don't work. A recent report by researchers at Johns Hopkins showed that teenagers taking "virginity pledges" engage in the same gamut of sexual practices at virtually identical levels as non-pledgers, only with a much lower use of condoms and other forms of contraception. In April 2007, a study conducted by Mathematica Policy Research Inc. of Princeton, N.J. for the U.S. Administration for Children and Families found that children who took part in abstinence-only programs became sexually active at about the same age and had as many sexual partners as those who participated in broader sex education classes. Despite spending $176 million annually and $1.5 billion in the past decade on abstinence programs nationwide, the United States has recently experienced increasing rates of sexual transmitted diseases and pregnancy among teens. (The 3% jump in teen pregnancy rates is the first increase in 15 years.) It's no wonder that by June 2008, 22 states opted out of President Bush's abstinence education program and turned down millions of dollars of federal funding that came with it.
Other recent studies mirror the CDC's findings. In 2006, the Guttmacher Institute compiled data showing rates of teen pregnancy and lives births to teen mothers for each state. As it turns out, 9 of the 10 states with the highest teen pregnancy rates voted for Bush in 2004; all 10 with the highest rates of live births among women ages 15 to 19 are reliably Republican. (The Distrct of Columbia is a notable outlier.) Virtually all of them are among the 28 states which continue to receive federal funds for abstinence education. Conversely, 9 of the 10 states with the lowest rates of teen births voted Democratic in 2004; North Dakota was the only red state to crack the top 10.
As I recently documented, health care, education and working conditions are generally most dismal where Republicans routinely win elections. Sadly, the same grim pattern applies to a wide array of measures of social dysfunction and pathology as well. In 2007, 7 of the top 10 states with the highest murder rates were squarely in Red America; conversely, 7 of the 10 states with the lowest murder rates were in the Obama column. (Interestingly, six of those states have no death penalty statute.) The 10 states with the highest divorce rates in 2002 went for Bush two years later. (More recent data suggests an improvement in the Bible Belt.) By almost any measure of societal breakdown that so-called Republican "values voters" decry, it is Red State America where moral failure is greatest.
And to be sure, these are all moral issues. Just not in the way Republican politicians and their conservative faithful claim.