National Review attempts to downplay the results of this study:

No, One Program Did Not Reduce Colorado’s Teen Pregnancy Rate by 40 Percent

After surveying numerous articles about this, I still feel like something is missing though I cannot put my finger on it.

Some questions begged:

1. Why are so many young people not proactive about contraception when information is so readily available beyond just public schools and private homes?
2. What would it be like if all education were private and sex education became a private matter, e.g. would we see a rise or drop in unplanned pregnancies and related poverty?
3. If the average young person really is this stupid and needs this much state coddling, where does this leave Objectivism as a philosophy that sees the individual as a sovereign entity from a young age forward?

(Edited by Luke Setzer on 7/06, 2:51pm)

The irony is that the compulsory state schooling dragging children from parents combined with taxes that force both parents to work drives a huge wedge between parents and children to the point that the Progressives can say their programs are "needed" to compensate for the shortage of time parents spend with their children!

Anyone who is interested in this should read the article and do a little googling before reciting our catechism. 

Taking advantage of the free program, Hope Martinez, a 20-year-old nursing home receptionist here, recently had a small rod implanted under the skin of her upper arm to prevent pregnancy for three years.  ...  Long-acting devices can cost between $800 and $900.

 

The private grant that funds the state program has started to run out ...  Colorado’s program, funded by a private grant from the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for the billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s late wife, was the real-world version of a research study in St. Louis (also paid for by the foundation... 

 

“There’s no lifeboat with the Affordable Care Act,” said Liz Romer, a nurse practitioner who runs the Adolescent Family Planning Clinic at [private, here] Children’s Hospital Colorado, which went from giving out 30 long-acting devices a year in 2009 to more than 2,000 in 2013.

 

Luke, the answers to your questions are simple enough, but those answers do not bring solutions to the problems. 

1. Why are so many young people not proactive about contraception when information is so readily available beyond just public schools and private homes?

First, young people are stupid. Maybe you were not; you might have been an old man when you were 13. In criminology, we say that most offenders age out of crime.  Family, work, life, tend to mitigate against the "idle hands" factor.  It is sort of an externality to "infant mortality": if you survive childhood, you live longer -- tautologously enough...  Shoplifting, drug use and abuse, reckless driving, gangs, truancy, sex, weird clothing, disrespect for authority, you know, it is all pretty much a package.  

2. What would it be like if all education were private and sex education became a private matter, e.g. would we see a rise or drop in unplanned pregnancies and related poverty?

Did Romeo and Juliette make good choices? Education was private for millennia.  Sex education was nearly non-existent.  

Most people understood the relationship between coitus and pregnancy in large terms.  But not every act resulted in a pregnancy. Phases of the moon, herbs, and actual ignorance were large factors in our understanding.  

While the non-mammalian animal egg was obvious, the doctrine ex ova omne vivum ("every living [animal comes from] an egg"), associated with William Harvey (1578-1657), was a rejection of spontaneous generation and preformationism as well as a bold assumption that mammals also reproduced via eggs. Karl Ernst von Baer discovered the mammalian ovum in 1827, and Edgar Allen discovered the human ovum in 1928. The fusion of spermatozoa with ova (of a starfish) was observed by Oskar Hertwig in 1876. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_cell

Those were people who lived close to farm animals. Growing up in the city, I assure you, as interesting as girls were, I had no perceptual knowledge of sexual intercourse.  I will grant you, though, that as soon as I got the lecture, the rest was clear, and I managed to avoid an unwanted pregnancy (terminated) until I was 25. ("What do you mean, you're not on the pill?")  And that underscores something about the statistics.  Despite "alarming numbers" we are still talking about minorities of people. "That means that 34 percent of teenagers have at least one pregnancy before they turn 20." -- http://www.teenhelp.com/teen-pregnancy/teen-pregnancy-statistics.html  From the same source, 15% to 25% of teen pregnancies result in miscarriage.  Also, note that one-third of pregnant teens finish high school. So, we have to moderate our sense of panic.  

When I was in the second grade (1957), we experienced a radical change in school board policy when our teacher continued to teach while pregnant. That reflected the attitudes about (ahem) "health classes" in school. And we had teen pregnancies, of course. People have had children out of wedlock since the invention of wedlock.  

Finally, my brother and his wife had to wait for her to turn 16 so that they could get a court order to get married. They were married  for 30 years before she died. I could go on and on about their lifecourse successes.  But that speaks to your third point. 

3. If the average young person really is this stupid and needs this much state coddling, where does this leave Objectivism as a philosophy that sees the individual as a sovereign entity from a young age forward?

They were both Objectivists, more or less.  Paul read Ayn Rand shortly after I did.  Jill took it up about a decade later and borrowed a bunch of materials from me from the early days. It is not that Ayn Rand saved their lives, but that they were thinking people, even if they had been impulsive teenagers.

Objectivism does not grant legal carte blanche to every person who asserts free will. Even in Galt's Gulch, it might be socially disgraceful - if not illegal - to sell tobacco to a minor. I think that everyone who pays taxes should vote.  So did Herbert Spencer, and he included children in that: children who work for wages should vote -- but not necessarily drive a car or join the army.  You cannot be President until you are 35.  Some of them were immature nonetheless, judging from their sexual escapades.

1. Why are so many young people not proactive about contraception when information is so readily available beyond just public schools and private homes?

I'll disagree with Marotta's answer.  Young people aren't stupid, they are growing up in a culture that discourages many kinds of learning – kinds of learning that they need – like critical thinking and a sense of what life requires of the individual.  All humans should be purposeful in a number of different ways, and this includes learning how to choose, focus on and pursue the object of one’s purposes – a process that changes greatly as we move from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. This is another thing that has to be learned, and which our current culture isn’t teaching.

The primary cause of not being proactive about contraception is a failure to learn the level of personal responsibility (a kind of purposefulness) and self-assertiveness needed (a mechanism serving purposefulness).

We evolved from an agrarian culture where childhood ended as the young person went into an apprenticeship to a culture with a prolonged adolescence combined with an awful k-12 and a great chasm between generations. This is a kind of childhood that extends into the early twenties in most cases with a great gap in learning (starting at about age 12) of many of the things which make for a healthy kind of maturity. 

We learned what was needed to be a clerk, or factory worker, or miner, or farmer from that apprenticeship back in a time where duty and survival ruled.  But as our culture, technology, and ways of living evolved we should be more autonomous.  With life not as short and brutish now, survival isn't the driving paradigm and duty isn't the controlling social context.  We are now in that cultural mileu that asks for stronger maturity as an individual, but we aren't getting the training needed to step into that kind of adulthood.

Progressives have kept government schools cut off from the evolutionary process they would otherwise have undergone.  The result is that they are concrete bound, stunted, ineffective, and no longer serving significant rational purposes.  At that time when the need for learning was undergoing one of the greatest changes since the printing press was invented, the school system was locked into a deteriorating pattern of ineffectiveness, and the parental effects in aiding their children's growth was culturally diminished - like stranding the children on an island for the most formative years of their lives.  Its only surprising that our culture is deteriorating faster!  It is not surprising that the best measure of our cultural deterioration is generational.

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2. What would it be like if all education were private and sex education became a private matter, e.g. would we see a rise or drop in unplanned pregnancies and related poverty?

Education is more than the 3 Rs.  During those most formative years what should be happening is that young people learn to think critically, acquire strong characters, and learn how to pursue a good life effectively.  We have to learn to be an adult individual.

Private education would bring about radical changes as a result of the combination of competition and fact that parents really do want the best for their children.  As time passed the schools whose graduates were having the most successes and the best lives would be emulated.  Learning to teach academic subjects would come first and be easy.  Learning to teach critical thinking wouldn't take much longer.  But it is the gradual realization that sorting out issues of psychology and character that would take longer, yet give the greatest of improvements.

Schools would start finding out what problems the kids were dealing with and bringing intelligent responses to bear.  Kids usually fail to do well because of fairly minor neurotic responses - things that good therapists can break through fairly easily.  Higher self-esteem is one of the best predictors of success and low self-esteem is the usual base reason for doing poorly.  A culture of only private schools, with the passing of time, would have a great effect on poverty.  (See my answer to question #1 to understand why sex education isn't very meaningful in the absence of the sense of personal responsibility and self-assertiveness.)

Marotta wrote:

The bottom line is that I reject Steve and Luke's easy generalizations about people they do not know.

Marotta, the bottom line is that no one knows what you are talking about when you don't bother to quote the part of someone else's post that you reject.  In post #6, you said, "...Young people are stupid."  (Talk about "easy generalizations.")  I disagreed with that and I said why.