The teen birth rate has risen for the first time in 15 years, and the shrill volume of the sex education debate has risen along with it.

Teen births have been steadily decreasing since 1991, but yesterday government statisticians announced that the birth rate went up 3% from 2005 to 2006. Planned Parenthood blames abstinence-based sex education, and the Family Research Council blames contraceptive-based sex education, but other experts say the problem may lie elsewhere.

Bill Albert, deputy director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, told WoW when researchers ask teens what influences their sexual behavior, they put sex education at the bottom of the list. In the Campaign’s most recent report, teens say that parents influence their decisions most — more than friends, religious leaders, siblings, or the media. Only 4% said that teachers or sex educators influenced their decisions, but 64% of teens said they share their parents’ view of sex.

“Sex education is necessary but it is not sufficient,” Albert said. “We have to look at these broader social forces.”

Kay Hymowitz, Manhattan Institute senior fellow and author of Marriage and Caste in America, told WoW that the issue is not primarily sex education but a broader cultural trend toward unmarried childbearing, which rose 8% in 2006 and reached a record high 1.6 million births.

“These young women do not think it is necessary for them to be married before they have children, or for their children to have reliable fathers,” said Hymowitz, adding that women who think this will neither practice abstinence nor use contraceptives consistently. She echoes the warning of other social researchers: “You are going to see more poverty and more inequality the more you see young women having children without being married.”

Hymowitz said until America reaches a cultural consensus on unmarried pregnancy, teens will receive mixed messages: “You can’t ask the schools to take on something the culture at large doesn’t believe.”

Although statistics suggest that half of teenage girls in Washington, DC, will be pregnant at least once, the DC Board of Education is discussing next week the elimination of all abstinence programs from the District’s schools.Activist members from the Local School Restructuring Team (LSRT) are pushing for a Health Education Standard that will ban abstinence education in favor of contraception-based instruction. They have already succeeded in getting Stuart-Hobson Middle School in northeast DC to shut down the school chapter of ULTRA Teen Choice, a character-based, peer-counseling organization that promotes abstinence outside of marriage.

Since November 2006, ULTRA at Stuart-Hobson had been conducting weekly club meetings about such issues as HIV/AIDs, pregnancy prevention, peer pressure, marriage, and self worth. ULTRA had also begun to match students with college-aged mentors committed to abstinence.

The program has no statistics at this point, but its director, Richard Urban, told WoW that many teens have made commitments to abstinence. One participant, seventh-grader Cameron Tate, wrote what he had learned: “If you’re a teenager in school, the baby would distract you while you’re studying. My life is care free.”