Gordon Clay here. This is National Teen Pregnancy Prevention Month to promote and support effective teen pregnancy prevention initiatives.

About 1 million teenagers will become pregnant this year; 95% of those pregnancies are unintended, and almost one third will end in abortion.

The United States has twice the teen pregnancy rate of any developed country despite the fact that our teens are not more sexually active than Swedish teens, or Canadian teens, or British teens.

Why? Because we don't educate about birth control in sex education classes, we don't discuss it at home, we don't give teens good access to it, and we don't advertise it in our media. Other countries do, and they are rewarded with low rates of teen pregnancy and teen abortions. But, you say, making condoms available in school-based clinics would ‘give kids the wrong idea’. In fact, 5 recent research studies indicate that it doesn't.

Educating teenagers about contraception makes them more likely to use contraception when they begin having sex, but it doesn't lower the age at first intercourse.

Why? Probably because the decision where and with whom to become sexually active is a very complicated one, rooted in family, peers, religion, the media, and individual personality factors. But the decision whether to contracept or not is a very simple one: is it available? If so, I'll use it. If not, I’m still going to have sex, but I’m not going to go out of my way to get birth control.

Until Americans get over their hysteria about giving young people access to birth control, we will continue to have the highest teen pregnancy rate in the developed world. It's really that simple.

May is also Masturbation Awareness Month? Is it a coinsidence?