By rights, nobody should be terribly pleased to learn that there were 890,000 teenage pregnancies in the U.S. in 1995. When the just compiled figures for that year were released last week, however, most public-health agencies were positively aglow--and with good reason: the number is the lowest it's been in more than 20 years. Among African Americans the news was even better. You'd have to go back 40 years to find a time when there were fewer pregnant teens.
One cause of the plunging figure is increased teenage abstinence, but another is that more and more girls are turning to an...