Just Say "Use Protection"
- From: trudogg <trudogg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 10:31:25 -0400
An editorial in today's New York Times is hardly news to anyone who
has ever been a teenager, but is important nonetheless:
Reliance on abstinence-only sex education as the primary tool to
reduce teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases ? as
favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress ?
looks increasingly foolish and indefensible.
The abstinence-only campaign has always been driven more by
ideology than by sound public health policy. The program?s tight
rules, governing states that accept federal matching funds and
community organizations that accept federal grants, forbid the
promotion of contraceptive use and require teaching that sex outside
marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical
effects....
A Congressionally mandated report issued this month by the
Mathematica Policy Research firm found that elementary and middle
school students in four communities who received abstinence
instruction ? sometimes on a daily basis ? were just as likely to have
sex in the following years as students who did not get such
instruction. Those who became sexually active ? about half of each
group ? started at the same age (14.9 years on average) and had the
same number of sexual partners.... [A] paper by researchers at
Columbia University and the Guttmacher Institute, published in the
January issue of The American Journal of Public Health, attributed 86
percent of the decline to greater and more effective use of
contraceptives ? and only 14 percent to teenagers? deciding to wait
longer to start having sex. At the very least, that suggests that the
current policy of emphasizing abstinence and minimizing contraceptive
use should be turned around.
Students should receive the message that the only fool-proof method of
preventing pregnancy or STDs is abstinence, but teaching only
abstinence is denying reality. That's nothing new for the Bushies, but
is a tremendous disservice to our nation's young people. Not to
mention a public health issue.
Congress will be reauthorizing these programs in upcoming legislation,
and the debate in funding these programs needs to come back to the
reality-based world.
....from the Kos
.
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