No one could have predicted...

Teenage pregnancies and syphilis have risen sharply among a generation of American school girls who were urged to avoid sex before marriage under George Bush's evangelically-driven education policy, according to a new report by the US's major public health body.

In a report that will surprise few of Bush's critics on the issue, the Centres for Disease Control says years of falling rates of teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease infections under previous administrations were reversed or stalled in the Bush years. According to the CDC, birth rates among teenagers aged 15 or older had been in decline since 1991 but are up sharply in more than half of American states since 2005. The study also revealed that the number of teenage females with syphilis has risen by nearly half after a significant decrease while a two-decade fall in the gonorrhea infection rate is being reversed. The number of Aids cases in adolescent boys has nearly doubled.

The CDC says that southern states, where there is often the greatest emphasis on abstinence and religion, tend to have the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and STDs.

We poured hundreds of millions of dollars over the last decade into abstinence-only "education"—barely disguised religious indoctrination programs that a congressional investigation found to be riddled with falsehoods and inaccuracies—and this is what we got: teen births up, syphilis up, HIV-infections up. Scores of young peoples' lives were ruined or derailed because Republican jackasses showered money on reckless religious nut cases while terrified Democrats cowered in the corner.