Teen pregnancy rates in the United States are up for the first time in years. The New York Times attributed this sad finding to a study by the Guttmacher Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit research group:

While teenage pregnancy rates for whites remain far lower than for blacks and Hispanics, the pregnancy rates increased for all three groups.

As previously reported, births to young women ages 15 to 19 — a statistic that is available more quickly than pregnancy and abortion data — rose from 2005 to 2006, and again from 2006 to 2007.

Since the teenage pregnancy rate is made up of births, abortions and miscarriages, it is likely that the teenage pregnancy rate rose from 2006 to 2007, as well.

The Guttmacher Institute blames abstinence-only programs for this scary trend. Teens are less likely to use contraception now that over a billion dollars has been spent on telling them not to have sex. Teen abortions are up by one percent.

On Tuesday’s The View, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, missing the point, proclaimed that we can reverse the pregnancy rate by telling girls to say no. Once a girl has had sex, she said, the girl perceives herself as “a girl who has sex,” but she should know that she still has the right to say no.

But, Elisabeth and other promoters of the GIRLS MUST SAY NO solution to teen pregnancy don’t take into account that girls, like boys, are highly sexual beings. It’s hard enough for a girl to deny her own inclinations, yet we expect her to do that and take responsibility for her boyfriend’s, as well.

So, here’s an idea: Why don’t we teach our sons to say no? Teach them from a very early age that sex is special and meant to be shared with only another very special person? In other words, what would happen if we raised our sons to “respect themselves” and “not give their bodies away,” the way we raise our daughters?

What if we raise our daughters to view boys who sleep around as “cheap” and “not the kind of fellow you bring home to mother,” instead of playboys, playas, and ladies’ men?

Girls are subject to the same temptations as boys. Sex is not a boy’s thing that a girl gives into because she wants to be loved, or because she suffers from low-self-esteem. Sometimes she needs someone to stop her before things get out of hand. Let’s lose the ‘boys will be boys’ mentality and help a girl out.

I’m not usually a fan of shoot-em-up movies.

But then one of my favorite actors, Liam Neeson, whom I haven’t seen in ages, showed up in Taken, and I bit the bullet (heh, heh). He compelled me to buy a movie ticket for the first time since my 13-year-old daughter and I went to see Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 last summer.

Neeson looked older, frayed around the edges, but still commanding and handsome in that offbeat way of his. He manages to convey what might have been pages of dialogue without opening his mouth. And there’s quite a lot to convey: He plays a once-estranged father, trying his damndest to renew his relationship with his teenage daughter. Just as he thinks he’s making progress, the girl falls prey to sex traffickers who kidnap her on a trip to Paris.

I admit some of the plot made me queasy: Father desperate to rescue the helpless, virginal daughter, but then I remembered the facts. Sex trafficking is not fiction. It’s a massive problem all over the globe, and I respect the attention Taken brings to it, whether it was intentional or not.

For more information on sex trafficking (or, more precisely, girls and young women being “taken” and sold into sexual slavery) and what you can do about it, check out Equality Now. It’s a valuable organization, and it needs us all to speak up.

Email or write your senator (and if you’re not sure who she is, you can find out easily by clicking here) and let her know that you want her to do everything possible to end the trafficking of human beings.

To learn more, go to the Huffington Post and The New York Times, both of which published articles about trafficking last July.

Oh, and see Taken. It’s 91 minutes of sheer excitement.