"The westernized world"

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Thu Jun 11 16:51:16 UTC 2009


A solicitation I just received asking support to those who seek to
"provide responsible sex education to teens" contains the following
passage:

The US has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the westernized world.
But why? "Abstinence-only" programs censor, mislead and misinform
teens, creating ignorance and a lack of trust.


In the context of such claims and statistics about where the U.S.
ranks, I've seen "the civilized/industrialized" world, the "Western
world", and of course the "free world", and probably others I haven't
consciously noticed, but I'm pretty sure I hadn't previously
encountered "the westernized world".  Lots of google hits, but I'm
not sure how far back it goes (I don't know how to use Nexis to
search for multiword phrases).  I assume Australia, Japan and South
Korea are part of the Westernized (but not Western) world, and vice
versa for, say, Bolivia.

LH

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