Abstinence Only Education - I'm beyond pissed!!

[progressivebydesign]

My 13 year old daughter just came home from jr. high. She was full of tales about this 'funny man' that came to talk to her 8th class all about abstinence. He told funny jokes, he shared what he thinks are the secrets of girls and boys (using TONS of stereotypes about the sexes), AND.. he told horror stories of a girl who got pregnant, had an abortion, had to have counseling, lost her boyfriend, was kicked out of the house.. ALL because SHE chose to have sex before she was married, JUST to make her boyfriend happy. (Cause all us women know that's the only reason to have sex, because men want it. Ha!). Anyway.. he said not one word about protecting yourself from STDs and pregnancy, EXCEPT by avoiding sex and saving yourself for marriage. This is ALL part of Bush's new plan to throw millions at abstinence only education in our schools, and to fight real sex ed.

Once a calmed down a bit.. she and discussed that she knows there are kids at school doing it already, and this would not stop them, but instead creates a atmosphere where they'll feel stigmatized if they ask for help with protecting themselves. We also agreed that those type of talks don't change anyone's minds.. they don't. If you're determined to have sex while your'e still in school, you will. It's incredibly stupid and risky (she agreed with that, too), but if someone is determined, they will do it. Better to be educated, than to feel shamed and ignorant. She and I laughed at the idea of a kid being given a condom and running out to use it, just because they know how to get one and how to use it. It's the other way around.

Anyway... that stupid assembly just hit me the wrong way. You should SEE some of the stupid things written on the bookmark this guy hands out. Among the reasons he told the kids not to have sex BEFORE MARRIAGE: So you won't be compared to an other's previous partner. So you won't STEAL from someone else's marriage. So you save the BEST sex for later. There were more.. but it was so damn corny and frightening.

I have NO problem with abstinence being taught as PART of a comprehensive program of sex education. I don't want it tilted in either direction... but this was the worst.

[MichiganVote]

1. Sex ed. is worse than a joke in some schools. Opt your kid out

and teach them yourself. Its silly to rely on the government for something that is easily taught by parents. You taught them how to be potty trained, not to talk to strangers, why bother leaving these important lessons in the hands of these people?

[FreedomAngel82]

4. That's what I'd do

If I had a kid in school now and they were teaching them I'd ask if my kid could be out of the class and teach them myself about condoms, birth control etc. Last weekend on Laura Flanders' show she had a girl from Texas who went through the program and she said kids were coming to her for advice about condoms and birth control and other issues. Like the orginial poster said: teens will have sex whether they want to wait or not. I remember a few years ago on the news networks they were really talking about teens and partying and at these parties the kids would have oral sex and alot of them didn't even consider that sex. I think sex ed is very important and not just abstience. Yes it's safer, but if you know teens and how their harmones are and how the media promotes it like crazy they'll want to have it they will. What if a teen gets a disease and doesn't know about it and lets it go on too long because of how their bodies are changing and they figure it's part of a change? I just think this program is careless and dangerous.

[MichiganVote]

6. I opted both my sons out of their "curriculum" even b/f abstinance

These programs are often ridiculous. The one in my area was more than stupid and I thought it was a waste of time and potentially demeaning to the students and the cause of 'healthy sexuality'.

No unwanted pregnancies on our end.

[noamnety]

2. Is there a school newspaper there? nt

[WLKjr]

3. crap dude, that brought back memories from 5th grade

I remeber shit like that too, did it help. Um that woould be a uh



NO!

[Merrick]

5. sickening. and all the preliminary results show

that schools where abstinence only programs have been implemented show higher rates of early unprotected sex and teen pregnancy.

SO YOU WONT BE COMPARED TO ANOTHER'S PREVIOUS LOVER?
That one's friggin' hilarious. Go ahead and compare me, after all I'll be comparing them all in the name of not getting stuck with doing it with a cold, dead fish all my life.

[Sgent]

7. In undergard I used to

teach sex education at OleMiss as part of a team of student counselors. (It was really rape prevention, but it wound up being sex ed). In Mississippi, many schools don't teach any sex ed at all. We would go into Freshman dorms, fraternities, and sororities.

I was absolutely dumbfounded by some of the questions we got -- things like "why should I use a condom since they don't work anyway", amazement at the STD rate at the school, etc.

This stuff is serious, and I am amazed at how many people are either willfully ignorant or radically opposed to any type of information.

[Deja Q]

8. After peak oil, let conservatives abstain. We don't want them to propagate

themselves and their sick lifestyles.

[ultraist]

9. NYT OpEd piece on this

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/16/opinion/16kristof.html?
Bush's Sex Scandal
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: February 16, 2005

I'm sorry to report a sex scandal in the heart of the Bush administration. Worse, it doesn't involve private behavior, but public conduct. You see, for all the carnage in President Bush's budget, one program is being showered with additional cash - almost three times as much as it got in 2001. It's "abstinence only" sex education, and the best research suggests that it will cost far more lives than the Clinton administration's much more notorious sex scandal. Mr. Bush means well. But "abstinence only" is a misnomer that in practice is an assault on sex education itself. There's a good deal of evidence that the result will not be more young rosy-cheeked virgins - it will be more pregnancies, abortions, gonorrhea and deaths from AIDS.

Look, I'm all for abstinence education. I support the booming abstinence industry as it peddles panties and boxers decorated with stop signs (at &dl_invite=generic_nonincentive&dl_autoskip=40&link=http%3A//www.abstinence.net/), and "Pet Your Dog, Not Your Date" T-shirts.
Abstinence education is great because it helps counteract the peer pressure that often leaves teenagers with broken hearts - and broken health. For that reason, almost all sex-ed classes in America already encourage abstinence. But abstinence-only education isn't primarily about promoting abstinence - it's about blindly refusing to teach contraception.

To get federal funds, for example, abstinence-only programs are typically barred by law from discussing condoms or other forms of contraception - except to describe how they can fail. So kids in these programs go all through high school without learning anything but abstinence, even though more than 60 percent of American teenagers have sex before age 18. In the old days, social conservatives simply fought any mention of sex. In 1906, The Ladies' Home Journal published articles about venereal disease - and 75,000 readers canceled their subscriptions. Congress banned the mailing of family planning information, and Margaret Sanger was jailed in 1916 for selling a birth control pamphlet to an undercover policewoman.

But silence about sex only nurtured venereal diseases (one New York doctor, probably exaggerating, claimed in 1904 that 60 percent of American men had syphilis or gonorrhea), so sex education gradually gained ground. Then social conservatives had a brilliant idea: instead of fighting sex ed directly, they campaigned for abstinence-only programs that eviscerated any discussion of contraception. That shrewd approach succeeded. In 1988, a survey by the Alan Guttmacher Institute found that only 2 percent of sex-ed teachers used an abstinence-only approach. Now, the institute says, a quarter of them do. Other developed countries focus much more on contraception. The upshot is that while teenagers in the U.S. have about as much sexual activity as teenagers in Canada or Europe, Americans girls are four times as likely as German girls to become pregnant, almost five times as likely as French girls to have a baby, and more than seven times as likely as Dutch girls to have an abortion. Young Americans are five times as likely to have H.I.V. as young Germans, and teenagers' gonorrhea rate is 70 times higher in the U.S. than in the Netherlands or France. Some studies have claimed that abstinence-only programs work, but researchers criticize the studies for being riddled with flaws. A National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy task force examined the issue and concluded: "There do not currently exist any abstinence-only programs with strong evidence that they either delay sex or reduce teen pregnancy." Worse, there's some evidence that abstinence-only programs lead to increases in unprotected sex. Perhaps the most careful study of the issue involved 12,000 young people. It found that those taking virginity pledges had sex 18 months later, on average, than those who had not taken the pledge. But even 88 percent of the pledgers had sex before marriage.
More troubling, the pledgers were much less likely to use contraception when they did have sex - only 40 percent of the males used condoms, compared with 59 percent of those who did not take the pledge. In contrast, there's plenty of evidence that abstinence-plus programs - which encourage abstinence but also teach contraception - delay sex and increase the use of contraception. So, at a time when we're cutting school and health programs, why should we pour additional tax money into abstinence-only initiatives, which are likely to lead to more pregnancies, more abortions and more kids with AIDS? Now, that's a scandal.

E-mail: [e-mail]

[Nikia]

10. I don't know if this is usually been brought up

Such programs are emotionally harmful to children who were sexually abused/raped/coerced into sex by an adult or much older teen, especially in an authority position. Some kids didn't have much of a say in the matter to have sex for the first time. Programs that tell them that they have already ruined their future marriage and adult sex life by the incident is especially damaging and just encourages them to be hypersexual.
I do think that the topic of sexual abuse should be brought up somehow. For us, it was brought up in kindergarten. I think that it would be good to bring up again in late elementary school since it seems that many children are victimized as they are just starting puberty.

[burpsalot]

11. Sex Ed should be taught by the parents

not schools. It's a disgrace.

[DrWeird]

13. Sex Ed should be taught by the schools.

Parents just aren't responsible enough.

[jdj]

12. I'm curious what she meant by "funny man".

Kids radar is usually dead-on, so I wonder if she picked up on the fact that this man was a perv or something.

[spanone]

14. Welcome to bushworld. This is a scary scary world. I don't mean Iraq.

[SmokingJacket]

15. I came of age during the first wave of AIDS cases...

We were taught condoms, condoms, condoms -- no values, no judgements, just: This will save your life.

I never had sex without one until I was married -- and I know this practice has kept many, many of my generation healthy.

Practical, honest, technical sex ed is what we need. Forget the quasi-religious crap.

[ultraist]

16. Teen HIV/AIDS rates have been increasing since 2000.

Bush is KILLING children by NOT informing them on the facts to keep themselves protected from HIV/AIDS.

Some of these kids are simply too embarrassed to talk to their parents or vice versa, for whatever reason it doesn't happen as much as it should.

There should be a PUBLIC HEATH CAMPAIGN to ENSURE OUR CHILDREN KNOW HOW TO PREVENT CONTRACTING & SPREADING AIDS.