Let’s Pledge to Stop Being Stupid About Teen Sex

[babylonsister]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081231_ellen_goodman_jan_1/

Let’s Pledge to Stop Being Stupid About Teen Sex

Posted on Jan 1, 2009

By Ellen Goodman

snip//

Our national investment in abstinence-only may not be a scam on the scale of Bernie Madoff. But this industry has had standards for truth as loose as some mortgage lenders. It manufactures a product as ill suited to the environment as the SUV. All in all, abstinence-only education has become emblematic of the rule of ideology over science.

The sorry part is that sex education got caught in the culture wars. It’s been framed, says Bill Albert of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, as a battle between “those who wanted virginity pledges and those who wanted to hand out condoms to 14-year-olds.”

Meanwhile, six in 10 teens have sex before they leave high school and 730,000 teenage girls will get pregnant this year. We see them everywhere from “Juno” to Juneau—or to be more accurate, Anchorage, where Sarah Palin, advocate of abstinence-only education just became an unplanned grandparent.

What the overwhelming majority of protective parents actually want is not a political battle. They want teens to delay sex and to have honest information about sexuality, including contraception. The programs that work best combine those lessons.

Soon Congress and the new administration will be asked to ante up again for abstinence-only programs. As Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood says, abstinence-only education was “an experiment gone awry. We spent $1.5 billion and can’t point to a single study that says this helps. If it doesn’t help, why fund it?”

Teens are not the only masters of denial. But we are finally stepping back from the culture wars. We are, with luck, returning to something that used to be redundant—evidence-based science. That’s a pledge worth signing ... and remembering.

[Locrian]

1. Amen

>>As Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood says, abstinence-only education was “an experiment gone awry. We spent $1.5 billion and can’t point to a single study that says this helps.


Millions of years biological history programs us to have sex. It's a PRIME human directive. Can't we recognize that and stop this "just say no" crap?

[ladym55]

2. There's a New Year's resolution we all need to keep

What the overwhelming majority of protective parents actually want is not a political battle. They want teens to delay sex and to have honest information about sexuality, including contraception. The programs that work best combine those lessons.

But what many parents get is a bunch of nonsense from fundamentalist churches so their children get such mixed messages. I live in an area where there are many fundie churches and all the corresponding hoo-ha. It's so very frustrating.

[izquierdista]

3. Delaying sex

The Shakers were very good about that. That's why there aren't many of them around.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

4. K&R, and, Support Planned Parenthood!!

the anti-sex-ed crowd is rooted in misogyny, IMOFWIW.

Planned Parenthood has always been under attack by conservatives; they are a great ally to women world wide, especially poor and underserved. Remember, it may be gawd's decree to conservatives, but it's life or death for women.