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To date most studies of the impact of school-based sex education have focused either on specific, local interventions or experiences at a national level. In this paper, we use a new cross-country dataset to explore the extent to which laws on sex education affect teenage pregnancy rates in developed countries. We find some evidence that laws mandating sex education in schools are associated with higher rates of teenage fertility. Parental opt out laws may minimise adverse effects of sex education mandates for younger teens. The estimated effects of mandatory sex education are robust to some but not all of our specifications designed to tease out causality. Taken together, changes in national laws relating to sexual health are unable to explain the significant declines in teenage pregnancy rates, which have been observed in many developed countries in recent years.

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This article presents a quantitative assessment of Catholic disaffiliates-i.e., those who were brought up Catholic, but who now no longer identify as such-in contemporary Britain. Using British Social Attitudes data, it seeks to i) gauge the overall extent of Catholic disaffiliation, and its significance relative to the retention/disaffiliation rates of other major Christian groupings; ii) identify patterns in the changing rates of Catholic retention/disaffiliation over the course of the twentieth century; iii) analyses Catholic disaffiliation in terms of key demographic variables (sex and age); and iv) compares the current religious beliefs and prayer practices of different groups of Catholic disaffiliates and retainees. As will be argued throughout this article, in-depth study of Catholic disaffiliates sheds important new light on the sociology of Catholicism in modern Britain. Furthermore, it contributes to ongoing discussions of secularization, precisely as a case-study of change over time within a significant religious minority.