The government’s abstinence-only lie
AT A time when one in four teenage American girls is infected with a sexually transmitted disease and millions of citizens are left without health insurance, it should come as an outrage that conservative politicians in Washington have doled out hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for increasingly disproved abstinence-only sex education programs.
Placing their activist, ideologically driven agendas ahead of the health of our nation's youth, we have been left to foot the bill for religiously motivated misinformation campaigns in our public schools.
Federally funded abstinence-only courses, which congressional studies have demonstrated have little impact on the premarital sexual activity of middle and high school students, continue to receive funding. This, despite their obviously useless educational credentials. For example, the guidelines for program grants ban the discussion of contraceptives in the classroom, except to point out their rates of failure.
What's more, teachers are required to offer a patriarchal, heterosexist view of sexual relations, while relegating all talk of safe sex to the garbage bin. This, of course, leaves students uneducated about a number of health issues and practices, but completely inundated with religiously motivated jargon about abstinence.
A buzzword in conservative educational circles, abstinence education has been proven in recent weeks to be ineffective in improving the sexual health of teenagers. Researchers with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found recently that youths who had pledged to abstain from sex until marriage were just as likely to engage in sexual activity as those who had not.
Disturbingly, however, these teenagers were statistically less likely to exercise safe sexual practices such as using condoms. As one researcher commented to the Washington Post, "There's been a lot of work that has found that teenagers who take part in abstinence-only education have more negative views about condoms...they tend not to give accurate information about condoms and birth control."
Recent news from the Obama transition office indicates that funding for these ideologically driven programs may face the chopping block in 2009. But there is more to this story than policy papers and research reports. This is an issue of education and public health.
Teenagers and all citizens have the right to accurate information and should expect to find it in their public schools. Instead, conservatives and religious zealots have continued the raid on public education by turning classrooms into pulpits from which to preach their narrow worldview and impress inaccurate material into the minds of pupils. What's more, it's our communities that have been left to shoulder the costs, not only of these classes but of the health issues which result.
The need for health care reform in America is evident, but we must look beyond HMOs and drug companies and understand that making healthy living accessible--without the interference of chauvinistic right-wing policies--is a vital part of the fight for economic and social equality.
Andrew Oxford, from the Internet
