Researchers writing in BioMed Central's open access journal Reproductive Health say, they have found a strong link between teenage birth rates and state-level measures of religiosity in the US. According to them, even after taking into account differences in income and rates of abortion, teenage birth rates are strongly predicted by conservative religious beliefs.

Using data from the Pew Forum's US Religious Landscapes Survey and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Joseph Strayhorn and Jillian Strayhorn evaluated the effect of a state's level of belief on the birth rates of teenage mothers.

According to Joseph Strayhorn: 'The magnitude of the correlation between religiosity and teen birth rate astonished us. Teen birth is more highly correlated with some of the religiosity items on the Religious Landscapes Survey than some of those items are correlated with each other.'

The researchers determined the religiosity of a state by the number of respondents agreeing with the eight most conservative opinions asked by the Religious Landscapes Survey e. g. 'There is only one way to interpret the teachings of my religion' or 'Scripture should be taken literally, word for word'.

Strayhorn says, while their findings do not allow causal inferences to be drawn, but speculation on the most probable explanation allow us to conjecture that religious communities in the States, showing a strong disaaproval for contraception are more successful in discouraging its use amongst their teenagers, than in preventing sexual intercourse.