From Nicholas Kristof for the NYTimes:
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.
The article includes a link to the Abstinence Clearinghouse where one can buy “Keep It” boxers (stopping just short of “in your pants”), “Chew On This” abstinence gum (great for freshening up right before a hot and heavy make-out session), “I’m Worth Waiting For” temporary tattoos (because nothing says “good girl” like a tattoo), and, I’m not kidding, a “Save Sex for Marriage” sucker.
Whomever designed these products forgot that hormone-riddled teenagers come hand-in-hand with dirty minds.
But back to the scandal:
…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.
Indeed.