Comparative Social Woes Category	Per 100K (1950)	Per 100K (2000)		Source
Teen Pregnancies (15-19)	80	40		Centers For Disease Control
Infant Mortalities	2920	700		Centers For Disease Control
Homocides	4.6	5.6		FBI: Uniform Crime Reports (2001)
Cigarette Consumption	350mil	210mil		Burns, Major, Andersen, Vaughan
Suicide (all ages)	13.6	10.7		Centers for Disease Control

• Conservatives seek to fund sexual abstinance training with public money. Abstinance, in the opinion of President Bush, is the only "surefire" way to prevent teen pregancy. Theory holds that Golden Age morality stressed an avoidance of sexual intercourse until the relationship was blessed with holy matrimony. Yet teen preganancy rates have been on a steady decline since the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Adults may exert strong influence, but hormones are even stronger. The data shows that current sex education works to prevent adolescent pregnancies.
• Conservatives charge that Progressives, through their support for abortion rights, have assaulted the sanctity of human life. But since the 1960s, we see a significant reduction in infant mortality as result of progressive programs such as Medicaid, Planned Parenthood, American Foundation for AIDS Research and the Guttmacher Institute.
• The conservative Golden Age is supposedly more idyllic than the current era but that is hardly reflected in homocide rates. From 1950 to 2000 the murder rate has increased by exactly one per 100,000. Since the Golden Age, conservatives have enacted policies that have created a lucrative illegal drug market. The FBI estimates that between 5 and 13% of all homocides in 2000 were a by product of the illegal drug trade. If we use the low end of that range and remove those homocides, we find the murder rate in 2000 was 4.6.
• The single greatest cause of preventable death is cigarette consumption. In this regard, the conservative Golden Age is characterized by more self-destructive behavior than the current era.
• Conservatives like to cite the three-fold increase in teen suicide since the Golden Age to support contentions that things were better then. While that statistic is accurate, we do find fewer people actually kill themselves in the contemporary era. Herein we find the source of Conservative affection for the 1950s. While that decade may have been a great time to be a kid, more people agreed that 2000 was a better time to be alive. Of course, once the conservatives abolish social security, suicide numbers should correct themselves in favor of the 1950s.