A teen perspective on abstinence-only education

Some teachers just don't like birth control, but people use it whether they like it or notAs a teen growing up in today’s world, I have been in the middle of one of the hottest choice-related topics right now- the abstinence-only debate. Though Spokane is in Washington state, which mandates comprehensive sexual education, the programs where I live are abstinence only. There is an amazingly negative opinion of sex at the schools.

Don’t get me wrong- I don’t expect them to do things like telling middle school students how to use a condom. But they told outright lies to discourage the students from having sex and getting abortions should they get pregnant. Some of the more outlandish examples included saying that a fetus gets a heartbeat at THREE DAYS. (I checked other sources- the actual figure is at least a few days later than that.) They also tilted the connotation of some statistics they presented: instead of saying condoms are 99.9% effective, they said condoms have a .1% failure rate. To a teen that age, the connotation attached to failure makes a .1 % failure seem like a 100% failure rate.
The program also acted as though homosexuality is non-existent: there was a box where you could put questions, and it was promised that ALL questions would be answered. My sister, who was in the class a year before me, asked about whether it is possible for STDs to be transmitted among homosexuals. She saw the teacher grab the question from the box, yet it was never answered.

Then, when I went to high school and took the semester-long health class, there was a unit on sexual health. Despite the name, all they did was try to scare us. (They went over the symptoms of each disease but then it became trying to scare us.) For example, during the unit on STDs and their symptoms, the teacher had us view a slide show of pictures of various body parts when infected with STDs. The teacher stated the purpose of the video. It wasn’t to know what to look for in STDs. It wasn’t to arm us with knowledge. It was to SCARE us so we wouldn’t have sex. The teacher actually said, “If even one person in this class, who would have had sex before, decides not to have sex after seeing this video, it will have been a success.” They don’t care if we know what an STD looks like (at least as long as we know he symptoms which they admitted are usually easily confused for other diseases, especially the flu), they just don’t want us to have sex. [Read more...]

Happy Friday! News Roundup

dogs in costumesOMG – I love dogs in costumes. I think more people should hand out little dog biscuits with the trick-or-treat candy, because little dogs like Halloween, too, you know.

On the pro-choice front, here’s your Friday click list to kick off the weekend!

When it Rains, it Pours . . . And Then There’s Health Care Reform – San Francisco Gate
Thanks, Abstinence-Only! Teen Pregnancies on the Rise – Feministing
Need a Halloween Costume? Dress Up as the Octomom – Womanist Musings
Justice Ginsburg Hospitalized Again – Voice of America
A Party to the Abortion Wars – Newsweek
Hillary Clinton Tops Obama in Popularity – Newsday

Senate Finance Committee Mucks Up Health Care Reform

orrin hatchOrrin Hatch can eat me. On Tuesday the Senator from Utah offered two amendments to the health care reform bill. One of them was approved by the Senate Finance Committee, the other one failed by a razor-thin margin. The amendment that passed would reinstate funding for abstinence-only sex education, despite the overwhelming evidence that it doesn’t work and that it’s a huge waste of taxpayer funds. The increase is to the tune of $50 million, despite Republican gripes that health care reform is going to be too expensive.

The second amendment would have restricted access to abortion under health care reform, even in the case of rape, incest, or a threat to the health of the woman. Under the Hatch proposal, insurance providers who want to offer coverage for abortion would have to offer a supplemental policy to women – in essence, women would continue to pay more for health insurance. Gee, thanks, Senator Hatch. You’re a peach.

Fortunately these were just committee votes. But you need to contact your Senators today and urge them to vote against these amendment.

The War on Choice: Sex Education

400000000000000076829_s4In Gloria Feldt’s The War on Choice, the right wing’s attack on sex education is put under the microscope. They have started small at the local school board level and worked their way up to the federal level. The result has been that abstinence is the only sex education that American students receive in the public schools. Feldt states, “The United States is the only country in the world that requires government-funded sexuality education programs to limit their teachings to abstinence–and we’ve got the disease and pregnancy rates to show for it.”

Here are some sex ed facts that you should commit to memory. (There may be a quiz about this.)

  • A sexually active teenager who does not use contraception has a 90% chance of becoming pregnant within a year.
  • The Netherlands, where sexuality education begins in preschool and is integrated into all levels of school, has the lowest teen birthrate in the world–eight times lower than that of the US.  The Dutch teenage abortion rate is eight times lower.  In France, where sexuality education is mandated starting at age thirteen, the teenage birthrate is six times lower than the US, and the abortion rate is two times lower.

Feldt cites numerous studies to show that public support is clearly on the side of comprehensive sex education. [Read more...]

Control of the Language = Control of the Debate

In her February 21, 2006 NPR.org article, Julie Rovner attempts to outline the short history of late term abortions, “without spin.” And she does a good job. As time permits, I will do a little more nit picking, but for now it is a good primer on the history of this particular facet of the abortion debate. It also contains an important lesson: control the terminology and you control the debate. Period.

Though 2006 seems like a long time ago, I think it is important to revisit the topic and her work is a good starting point. Of course, since 2006 one of the only providers in the country willing to perform the procedure was murdered — gunned down in cold blood, in church — and, as a result, women everywhere lost yet another person qualified to provide late term abortions as well as crucial family planning and other services.

Sadly, we can’t change the fact that Dr. Tiller was murdered. We can’t change the fact that the pro-life anti-woman movement has (and will likely stay) engaged in activities ranging from distribution of medically inaccurate information to domestic terrorism in order to ensure that women are not allowed to exercise their own judgment with regard to their reproductive health.
[Read more...]

Sex education is hard work

Comprehensive sex education is hard work but it’s completely necessary, especially now. At NARAL Pro-Choice Washington, I spend my whole day surrounded by sex education. It’s all I’ve worked on since I started the job seven months ago and one of the most interesting things I’ve learned is that many parents don’t even realize that their kids aren’t getting comprehensive sex ed. They assume nothing has changed since they went through grades 5-12. Unfortunately, they are wrong.

Somehow, in the late 90s and early 2000s, there was a shift and abstinence-only education became much more popular. The Guttmacher Institute  released a study and found that in 2002, 62% of sexually experienced female teens had received some education on contraception prior to having sex. This is generally a good number. Obviously it’s not ideal but if more than half of these teens know what to do to protect themselves, that’s great. However, when you compare it to the fact that just 7 years earlier, 3/4s of sexually experienced females had received the same comprehensive information, it is a little shocking. Abstinence-only took hold of this country that quickly. [Read more...]

Congrats, Anti-Choicers: Teen Birth Rates on the Rise

condomsWell ain’t that something? A new study in the Journal of Adolescent Health shows that teen pregnancy rates, which had been on a 14 year decline, have been steadily on the increase since 2006. The study attributes the rise to a decrease in contraceptive and condom usage. According to an article in today’s Washington Post:

Instead, the researchers found that there appears to have been a subtle decrease in contraceptive use, including a slight increase in the use of the withdrawal method and the proportion of teens reporting no contraceptive use. But perhaps most importantly there was a small but significant drop in condom use, which fell from about 57 percent to about 55 percent from 2003 to 2007.

The study did not examine why these trends occurred. But Santelli says it could be due to a number of factors, including rising complacency about the AIDS epidemic and safe sex to protect against HIV. But Santelli also says the recent increased focus on encouraging kids to remain abstinent until marriage instead of teaching them about contraceptive may also be at least partly to blame.

[Read more...]

Study Shows Abortions More Frequent For Private School Students

Well ain’t this a little piece of irony. According to CBS, a new study shows that students who attend private religious schools are more likely to receive abortions than students who attend private schools.

. . . in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior showing that unwed pregnant teenagers and women in their 20s who attend or have graduated from private religious schools are more likely to have abortions than young women who go to public schools:

Researchers studied some 1,504 unmarried and never-divorced women ages 26 and younger from 125 schools. The women were as young as 14 and as old as 26 at the time they discovered they were pregnant. Some one quarter admitted having abortions, which researchers say is probably an underreported percentage.

I think the explanation for this is pretty simple. Abstinence only sex education is a joke, ya’ll. Multiple government studies have confirmed this. This study was obviously in the works well before the Sonia Sotomayor nomination or Dr. Tiller’s murder, but the timing of its release couldn’t be any better.