Beat the Devil.

The article focuses on Mike Males's paper on teenage sex epidemic in Anacostia in Washington D.C. Males argues that the whole notion of a (black) teenage sex epidemic, born of teenage "irresponsibility," is utterly bogus. If there was an "epidemic" in the growth of teenage parenthood, Males observes, it was mostly in the late 1950s and the 1960s, coinciding with the falling age of puberty, rising postwar teenage populations and the sexual revolution. Births among teenage girls peaked in 1958, declined through the mid 1980s and have since risen, for reasons of youth poverty. Among all age and race groups, higher rates of poverty provoke higher rates of birth. Poverty, not age, is the problem.