According a recent letter to the editor, the local abstinence-only program told students that condoms break one out of seven times during sexual intercourse, thus leading to pregnancy and STDs.
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Condoms break one out of seven times? Erm, that’s crap.
Distorting the facts to scare students into compliance seems like a poor idea. It’s not just inaccurate condom facts (condoms are 98% effective in preventing pregnancy if correctly used, by the way). HIV can be transmitted through tears and sweat?. Touching a person's genitals can result in pregnancy? Half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus? Riiiggghhht.
Inaccuracies aside, perhaps abstinence-only education in general is a poor idea. Just telling teens they can’t engage in an activity at least as fun as most Play Station 2 games seems destined to fail. I had sex as a teenager, and I was one of the “good” kids. However, thanks to plenty of knowledge about contraceptives, I’ve remained STD and unwanted-pregnancy free. Students who take abstinence pledges have, in some studies, been shown to delay sexual activity. However, these same students are less likely to use contraceptives once they do start having sex than students who didn’t take abstinence pledges (for 88% of these students, this first time is still before marriage, irregardless of the abstinence pledge).
Other studies have shown no correlation between abstinence only education and the deference of sexual activity.
There are people out there who won't have sex until they are married. However, these are a) the minority and b) likely the people who have enough willpower to not have sex even if someone explains to them how a condom works. Perhaps some of the students who would have otherwise spent their prom night in the back of a car will be so inspired by their health teacher’s words of wisdom that they will swat away their dates’ roving hands. The rest will still be having sex, just without the knowledge they need to prevent STDs and pregnancy. Go ahead, parents and churches, explain to your children why they should wait until marriage to have sex (good luck- for many of them, you’ll need it). Education, however, seems as if it should be, well, educational. And accurate. And possibly even grounded in methods that have been proven effective, unlike abstinence only sex-ed.
Actually, I thought these sorts of programs would be mostly gone by now. I remember the big push by President Bush for abstinence-only programs about a year and a half ago…. and the subsequent studies that noted their ineffectiveness. I found it all quite funny back then. BUT WE ARE STILL FUNDING THESE SORTS OF PROGRAMS INSTEAD OF COMPREHENSIVE SEX-ED. For historical purposes, I’ve posted my… erm… "concerns" (okay, it's just a satire) about the entire fiasco below, as circulated about a year and a half ago. Apparently, important members of the government haven’t been closely reading and acting upon my opinions. I’ll overlook the discretion- this time.
