<p>“Do teens seriously get pregnant just because they don’t have any access to birth control?”</p>
<p>Yes. If you don’t have awareness and understanding, you don’t have real access, even if you live in a big city and there are drugstores with condoms for sale. Teens who don’t use them have all kinds of short-sighted teenager reasons: they don’t want Mom to find them; they think their partner will be insulted; they don’t have cash on hand; they believe myths about fertility cycles; they don’t want to admit to themselves that they are planning to have sex; they aren’t aware that condoms actually work well when you use them right (abstinence-only “education” only teaches the failure rate). Education can potentially change all of that. With comprehensive education, you don’t get perfect contraceptive use from teens, but you get improvement.</p>
<p>Sex ed by itself doesn’t address teens getting pregnant on purpose, which is a significant chunk of the teen pregnancy problem. There’s a separate and much tougher set of issues going on there.</p>