Doing it wrong

You know, sometimes I wonder about that ''faith-based'' world where kids still go to malt shoppes, and don't kiss until the third date, and never have sex until after the wedding.

Here's the latest:

Teenage pregnancies and syphilis have risen sharply among a generation of American school girls who were urged to avoid sex before marriage under George Bush's evangelically-driven education policy, according to a new report by the US's major public health body.

In a report that will surprise few of Bush's critics on the issue, the Centres for Disease Control says years of falling rates of teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease infections under previous administrations were reversed or stalled in the Bush years. According to the CDC, birth rates among teenagers aged 15 or older had been in decline since 1991 but are up sharply in more than half of American states since 2005. The study also revealed that the number of teenage females with syphilis has risen by nearly half after a significant decrease while a two-decade fall in the gonorrhea infection rate is being reversed. The number of Aids cases in adolescent boys has nearly doubled.

Note that the numbers are up in more than half the states. Although demographic factors such as ethnicity and income are important since rates are highest among African-American and Hispanics, they probably reflect the religious mindsets in the schools. What's more, kids in the northeast, where rates are lower, have access to more options.

Read the whole study here.

The age group of adolescents aged 15--17 years sometimes was included to reflect the fact that consequences of poor reproductive health are likely to be more severe in this group than among persons aged 18--19 years because early pregnancy and poor health are likely to interrupt their schooling and to have greater social and economic impact.

Can you say more poverty? More crime? Bad long-term health outcomes? (Half the girls who were pregnant did not get proper prenatal care maybe because they either did not know they were pregnant or hid their pregnancies.)

Some more findings from the study:

One-third of adolescents hadn’t received instruction on birth control methods before age 18.

There were more than 744,000 pregnancies among teen girls younger than 20 in 2004 - about 16,000 were among girls aged 10 to 14.

Approximately 1 million teens and young adults aged 10--24 years reportedly had chlamydia, gonorrhea, or syphilis. While one-quarter of females aged 15 to 19, and 45 percent of females aged 20 to 24 had human papillomavirus (HPV) infection during 2003-2004.

More:

Planned Parenthood said the CDC report is "alarming" and confirms that teenagers need "medically accurate, age-appropriate, comprehensive sex education".

But supporters of abstinence-based education said that the new report shows that there is too little not too much emphasis on discouraging sex before marriage.

Look, I agree we live in a hyper-sexualized society. Sex is used to sell all kinds of things. Little girls are encouraged to dress like 20 year old hookers. Sitcom characters who, in my day, slept in twin beds and pajamas, now all but have sex on screen, even on ''family'' shows.

You can't turn back the tide.

Just look at Bristol Palin and Jamie Spears.

So ''discouraging sex before marriage'' is just a valuable waste of school time which could be spent either teaching kids how to avoid pregnancy and STDs -- or even how to do calculus. Kids will have sex before marriage. Deal with it.

But can you believe it? In some areas, where anti-choice pharmacists refuse to dispense birth control and even keep condoms in locked display cases, kids don't have a hope of avoiding problems.

All of this is exacerbated by how little support teen mothers get, either with childcare or healthcare.

Can somebody please explain this whacked out mindset that abandons children with children, while doing nothing to prevent the problem in the first place?

There are forces here in Canada that would institute many of the same abstinence-only practices -- if they don't already.

If you ask me, abstinence-only education is child abuse.

Comments

[Luna]

"...abstinence-only education is child abuse"

Yes! Absolutely! For both the knocked-up teens AND the children they have.

[...pat.]

It's really sad. Just go over to Yahoo Answers, and see how many questions there are from young girls who don't know if their actions could have resulted in them being pregnant. I have no doubt that some areas of Canada have many people who would wish abstinence-only non-education on the kids. People have to vote. Pay attention to the issues. Know what is going on, and not be swayed by 15-second commercials, but by the real agendas of trustees, city councillors, MPPs and MPs. And party leaders.

[Keith]

Is this a freudian slip or just feminist logic?

"So ''discouraging sex before marriage'' is just a valuable waste of school time which could be spent either teaching kids how to avoid pregnancy and STDs -- or even how to do calculus. Kids will have sex before marriage. Deal with it."

So what exactly is a Valuable Waste? Or is it in Antonia's subconscious that discouraging sex before marriage actually good for all children. Could it be that her reluctance to agree with the Right is causing with her selfconflict.

[CatBoreal]

*SIGH*

Like you said, this is hardly a surprise. Simply put, we need better sex education in schools - even Canada could use some improvements.

The nuts and bolts of sex (sorry, couldn't resist) should be taught in Science class, gender specific issues should be taught in Health class. *BOTH* should touch on contraception, with the lions share of the information on the subject coming in Health.

I remember the pitiful sex education I received in Catholic School. I thought you could get pregnant by kissing a boy.

I didn't kiss my dad goodnight for months.

[David Marniss]

Teaching only abstinence isn't an effective way of stopping these problems, but neither is merely providing contraceptives. If anyone really cared about this, they'd be teaching sex more effectively. Neither method is worth anything on its own. Unless kids are taught about both abstinence and pre-marital sex, allowed access to contraceptives and just taught in general, none of this is going to change.

Ignorance leads to evil....>_>

[The Stygian and his Shemitish Dogs]

"You can't turn back the tide."

Yes, you can.

Apparently "Victorian morality" was partly the result of a massive backlash against the excesses of the Regency.

But do we want to make the effort?

[neko]

What I think a lot of the Abstinence advocates don't realize is what Teenagers actually think of Marriage. Marriage isn't vows and God and all of that crap. Marriage = Love. So it's ok to have sex with someone if you love them because its assumed that Marriage will one day follow. It's ok if you love them and they don't love you, because Marriage=Love and Love=Sex, so they will love you eventually.

I'm not too far removed from my hormonal teenaged days. I clearly remember my dead certainty that If I could only trip a boy I liked into bed, he would love me. I remember my friends being certain of this as well. Hell, I remember friends and siblings alike teasing me for being a virgin at the ripe old age of 15. How was anyone ever going to want or love me if I wouldn't put out?

We forget as we grow old, to be a teenager is to be a member of an alien species that thinks and acts differently. There is an entirely different set of rules and logic; you have to work within those parameters to get a message through. We need someone like Jane Goodall to live amongst them, observing their strange society.

Then there are the fun Catholic kids (many of whom live in Canada, I'm afraid) who think that Sex is a sin and Birth Control is a sin and we are all sinners anyway... but it's best to not compound the sin, so sex is had without birth control. But that's a whole other ballgame.

[johnnykap]

"If you ask me, abstinence-only education is child abuse."

And you wouldn't exaggerate...not in a million years....

[William Hayes]

"Just saying 'No' prevents pregnancy the way 'Have a nice day' cures chronic depression." Fay Wattleton, Conference speech, Seattle, 1988.

Wattleton's remark is quoted in The Spirit Level: Why more Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009.

Chapter 9 of this recent book reports the complex truth that "the teenage birth rate is strongly related to relative deprivation and inequality." UNICEF data from 2001 showed unequivocally that more unequal countries had higher teenage birth rates. At the top of the chart was the US; at the bottom was Japan. Canada was about in the middle.

[PaulR]

The conservative fetishization of virginity (such as the Southern-fried Purity Balls, where daughters pledge to their fathers that they will remain virginal until marriage) has resulted in some intriguing teen logic loopholes.

Specifically, those darned teens are skipping regular intercourse, and instead jumping right into some - er - hardcore backdoor shennanigans - thus keeping themselves "pure" for their future husbands. Columnist Dan Savage has coined the term "Saddlebacking", I believe, after Senator Brownback who endorses abstinance only education.

Troubling, on a few levels, chiefly because this can be a riskier activity when practiced without proper education or protection. And we all know abstinence-only education is all about sexual education and providing access to protection.