Compared to whom?
The members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are a popular reference set when comparing NZ performance. Or at least, they used to be. The OECD has expanded over the decades since it was formed, and not everyone’s referencing has kept up.
Yesterday, I wrote about imprisonment rates. Today, a (mostly good) Dominion Post editorial about sex education said
New Zealand has the third highest teen pregnancy rate among OECD countries.
In fact, the OECD said last year (their most recent report, PDF) that NZ has the ninth highest teen pregnancy rate among OECD countries:
It is third-highest among countries that joined the OECD before 1990, but that’s starting to look less like a natural comparison.
The other point the graph makes is that teenage pregnancy is less common than it used to be, essentially everywhere where there is data. The editorial argues that the internet has made alternatives to proper sex education worse than they used to be. That’s a reasonable position on some important issues, but it clearly doesn’t apply to teen pregnancy, and it would be nice to see this admitted more often.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »