More on sex ed
Apparently, Mr. Strickland isn’t the only one who’s decided to “just say no” to whoring out our students to abstinence only education for the almighty federal dollar.
According to the New York Times:
At least nine states, by one count, have decided to give up the federal matching funds rather than submit to dictates that undermine sensible sex education. Now there is growing evidence that the programs have no effect on children’s sexual behavior.
Hooray for people finally waking up and realizing the morals have nothing to do with knowledge, and usually are quite opposed to it!
I will admit, though, I was surprised about the little snippet below from this article.
Teens in both groups were just as likely to use condoms or birth control, the report found — countering the fears of critics of abstinence-only education, who say children ignorant of how to protect themselves from pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases will simply have more unprotected sex.
If abstinence only education is at least not preventing kids from using birth control, I must admit that quells my fears substantially. However, I still believe that creating an environment where kids are afraid to talk about their bodies and actions is unhealthy and helps perpetuate the weird relationship our society has with sex. I’m honestly glad, though, that there’s “only” psychological damage at stake, rather than increasing risk of diseases et al that are sometimes impossible to heal.
I particularly liked this quote:
“We have been promoting ignorance in the era of AIDS, and that’s not just bad public health policy, its bad ethics,” added James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth.
More from the NYT article after the jump.
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. The chief caveat is that none of the four programs studied continued the abstinence instruction into high school, the most sexually active period for most teenagers, so it is not known whether more sustained abstinence education would show more effectiveness.
Supporters of abstinence-only education sometimes point to a sharp decline in teenage pregnancy rates in recent years as proof that the programs must be working. But 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.
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