Suppose there were something you could tell a 15-year-old girl that would provably, measurably reduce her chance of getting pregnant — by 60 percent.

Imagine the potential benefit to her health, her education and her future income, and to Texas taxpayers, who will bear a lighter burden. Right now the state has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in the United States. Seven hundred Texas school districts — nearly 70 percent — now vie for grants to keep their pregnant students healthy and in school.

There are words that can bring the promised benefits: They're called the truth.

This spring, the Journal of Adolescent Health published research showing that teens who got comprehensive sex education in schools were 60 percent less likely to become, or make somebody, pregnant. The figures compared those teens to peers who got no formal sex ed.

Even more striking — considering the federal government pays $170 million in taxpayer money yearly to support it — abstinence-only education had no discernible effect in stopping or delaying sexual intercourse.

The researchers studied data from a 2002 survey of 1,700 boys and girls between the ages of 15 and 19. The findings reflected what smaller studies, and social service providers have insisted for years: Tell teenagers the truth about their bodies and their health, and an important number will process those facts into the right choices.

To raise a teen's chances of pregnancy, abstinence-only education is just the thing. This approach starts with the excellent premise that teens should just say no to sex. But too often — in obvious contradiction to everything teens learn from pop culture and their peers — Texas' abstinence-based classes suggest that if teens do have sex, pregnancy, disease and breakdown are inevitable.

In some schools, the only mention of birth control is misleading data on its failure rate. This untruth robs sexually active teens of their best chance to ward off pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease.

For the unluckiest, the abstinence-and-fiction approach teaches that no doctor, teacher or parent could possibly give help to a girl who breaks the abstinence code. At its worst, this hopelessness contributes to disasters like the recent gruesome, unattended births — and deaths — of schoolgirls' babies.

In the past week, Texans have been sickened at the perverse cult that forced young girls to reproduce. The girls at the Yearning for Zion Ranch seemed not to know they had any alternative. Apparently, no adult in their community told them the truth about what was healthy or normal.

Outside the hellish ranch's confines, many Texas girls of 13, 14 and 15 also routinely are impregnated. Sex education is the scientifically proven way to help these girls— by explaining to them that they don't have to be sexually active or pregnant or infected with a sexually transmitted disease. Who can justify not telling them?