Warning! This is about (shhhhh) s-e-x

The news is mostly good.

Arkansas is not No. 1. Not No. 2 or 3 either.

Arkansas comes in the No. 4 position for the award for most teenager pregnancies per 1,000 teenagers.

Thank God for Mississippi, Texas and New Mexico, which held the top three places.

The Associated Press story about this teen birth cultural phenomenon informed the reader that Mississippi led the nation with more than 60 birthings by teenagers, more than 60 percent over the national average of 42 births per 1,000 teens.

That figure is even more shocking if you consider that Mississippi doesn’t have as many teenagers as does, say, California, New York or Florida. But with more babies per teen capita, that gap is narrowing. (Statistically the paragraph above doesn’t make sense, I know, but it will to those in Mississippi who can read.)

Mississippi has 68 births per 1,000 teens, New Mexico has 64 and Texas, 63. Arkansas has 62, which is down from 79.5 teen births per 1,000 in 1991.

So we don’t let California or Florida totally off the hook, the rates in those states climbed by more than 30 percent in the past several years. New Hampshire with 19 births per 1,000 teens is at the bottom (or the top, depending on your point of view) of the list. You can figure that it's too cold and people wear too many clothes for much of the year when trying to figure out this statistic.

Regarding Mississippi’s surge to the top (or bottom) of the chart, a Mississippi State University researcher who focuses on children’s health issues, said it could be a one-year “statistical blip.”

Blip? Euphemism for s-e-x, it can be supposed.

The know-all right-wingnuts among us will point out that the states with proportionately more blacks and Hispanics are the states leading the grouping. Those groups traditionally have more teenage pregnancies, true. But then, other states – California, Arizona, New York, Florida, Alabama, etc. – also have a high representation of those ethnic groups in their population base.

If nothing else, the explanations by statistical and s-e-x-p-e-r-t-s for the “blip” are, well, interesting. The media attention on celebrity pregnancies, i.e., Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin’s daughter, and Britney Spear’s sister, Jamie (star of the “Zoey 101” television show, resulted in teen pregnancies being considered “chic” or “hip,” according to one magazine.

Hip or blip?

So-called experts are blaming the national rise in results of blipping on increased federal funding for abstinence-only health education programs that do not mention protected s-e-x. We were trying to figure out how to blame former President Bush for this unfortunate statistical “blip.”

That fact alone explains it to our satisfaction.