don’t read this!
by Sandra Kinne
Published: March 21, 2008
President George W. Bush must be so proud of his abstinence-only education platform. Last week, he got some good news: 3 out of 4 female teenagers don’t have an STD.
Wait a minute. If 3 out of 4 are disease-free, that means 1 in 4 female teenagers have an STD. That’s not good news.
The findings come from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey released last week. The study also found of those surveyed, 15 percent had more than one of the sexually transmitted diseases monitored - HPV, chlamydia, genital herpes and trichomoniasis. (Yes, that last one’s new to me, too. It’s a common parasite that cannot survive in the mouth or rectum. You figure out how the young ‘uns are getting it.)
Despite these findings, abstinence-only remains the administration’s policy. According to a very conservative, abstinence-only website I reluctantly visited (I visited Planned Parenthood, too, to keep my liberal karma in check), President Bush asked Congress to appropriate $191 million for various abstinence-only programs this year, up from $176 million already spent annually.
He wants to spend $191 million despite these statistics and a national-study, released last year, which concluded abstinence-only education programs were ineffective and did not prevent teenagers from having sex. Like the Iraq war, his economic policies and his own personal education, Bush’s abstinence-only stance has been a complete failure.
According to an April 2007 Washington Post article, less than a quarter of teens used a condom each time they had sex and more than a third had two or more partners. Extrapolating last week’s findings, 3.2 million teenage girls nationwide have an STD. Sure, teenage pregnancy rates have declined in recent years, but you can’t get pregnant if you’re re-enacting scenes from the Oval Office circa Monica Lewinsky’s intern years. You can, however, catch STDs that way.
I’m not arguing abstinence doesn’t work. It absolutely does. That’s not the issue. The issue is abstinence-only education programs. Abstinence-only education programs simply do not work.
When all children hear - and really, we’re talking about middle school and high school kids; they are still children - is “Don’t have sex” instead of “Here’s how to protect yourself while having sex,” of course they’re going to catch something. If they don’t know to, let alone how to, protect themselves, how will they?
I told you not to read this article; guess what, you’re halfway through. I hope you put in some eye drops or put on your glasses to protect your eyes while you read on the computer. You didn’t? Oh, well, I didn’t tell you to before hand, but I assure you that telling you not to read this was education enough.
We don’t have to look far to see where kids are getting the idea to engage in unsafe sex - or in sex, for that matter. Sure, we can blame the usual suspects: the media; television shows like “Gossip Girl,” “Big Brother,” anything on E!; a hypocritical society that shuns sex education but rewards sex tape creators with their own perfume, show on Fox and fame beyond the fabled 15 minutes. But honestly, it’s not just the entertainment world. (Though, in all fairness, not one of those shows I named is entertaining.)
The fact is we don’t need to blame the messenger this time; we can go directly to the decision-makers, those who set the policies around sex education for our country’s children.
We’ve got taped conversations with a governor’s “hired help” discussing how he wanted an unsafe rendezvous; a governor who had planned to give a speech to a family planning conference and meet with a Cardinal on the day his scandal broke.
We’ve got a senator, who voted to fund abstinence-only education, soliciting in a public men’s restroom. The toilets in public restrooms are disgusting; he really thought that with a stranger in a public restroom would be clean and safe?
We’ve got an ex-president, who apparently had so little to do while governing the free world, that he found time to dilly-dally with an intern. Then, perhaps just for kicks, decided to argue - in a taped deposition, no less - the definition of sex.
Is it any wonder our nation’s teenagers are not only engaging in sex - be it oral or otherwise - but doing so in ways that put themselves at such risks? If our married, Ivy-league educated elected officials can’t define it or practice it safely, how can our 15-year-olds?
1 in 4 teenage girls have an STD. Ignorance isn’t bliss; it’s risky, stupid and proven to be pointless.
George W. may be fond of abstinence-only policies; too bad Barbara and George H.W. weren’t back in 1945.
—
(email this article or post to social network)
—
