Attribution: PittNews/CC.
Several years ago, David Wiley, a professor of health education at Texas State University, was discussing human papillomavirus in one of his classes. The virus, known as HPV, is the most common sexually-transmitted disease. Often it is harmless and infected individuals aren’t even aware they have it. But it can also cause cancer, including of the cervix.
Wiley was discussing all of this with his students — the different types of HPV, the connection between HPV and cervical cancer, and its prevalence; “you know, just an intro, lower-level course,” he recently recalled — when a male student raised his hand with an earnest question: What was his risk of contracting cervical cancer?
“And I don’t know what’s sadder,” Wiley told The Intercept, “that he asked that question or that really nobody in the classroom even laughed because they didn’t know either.”
[…]
The federal government began funding so-called Abstinence-Only Until Marriage programs in 1981 as a way to encourage “chastity” and “self-discipline.” Since then, the feds have poured more than $2 billion into this strategy — commonly known as “ab-only” — without any proven positive effects, like delaying sexual activity or avoiding unintended pregnancy. In recent years, that funding had been in decline, in part because research — and practical experiences like Wiley’s — shows that the programs do not work. But in an ironic twist, they’re now making a comeback. Trump, an alleged serial adulterer who has bragged about sexually assaulting women and has been accused of such behavior close to two dozen times, has asked that abstinence funding be increased. And in the budget deal he signed last month, he got his wish, enough to bring total spending on abstinence up to $100 million for 2018.
[…]
Under Obama, funding for ab-only programs decreased as new emphasis was placed on using science to develop evidence-based sexuality and reproductive education strategies. But the Trump administration is trying to reverse course. Along with the return to Bush-era funding levels to push the ab-only message, Trump has appointed anti-abortion, anti-birth control, and pro-ab-only advocates to positions within the Department of Health and Human Services and has yanked funding for a successful evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention strategy.
[…]
Among the biggest proponents of ab-only programs — and their rebranding — is Valerie Huber, a Trump appointee to HHS. Huber started her career promoting ab-only programs in her son’s school before moving on to manage the ab-only program at the Ohio Department of Health. She became the president of the National Abstinence Education Association in 2007. (The advocacy organization has also rebranded itself. It’s now known as Ascend.) Huber acknowledges that the term “sexual-risk avoidance” was taken from public health, but insists it was appropriately chosen. “I bristle at the terminology ‘abstinence only,’ because our programs are so holistic,” she told Focus on the Family’s magazine “Citizen,” and address “a whole battery of different topics that surround a young person’s decision whether to have sex or not.”
This is, of course, exceedingly bad news. If you’re a parent who prefers their child to be prepared and safe, best to tackle comprehensive sex-ed at home, or an outside of school class. This will affect some states much more than others, so it’s important to find out just what the sex-ed in your child’s school is like. Ab-only also cuts out all queer students, and teaches girls that being assaulted or raped is their fault, emphasising dress and behaviour.
The Intercept has an in-depth article about this mess, recommended reading. As the Tiny Tyrant has a vested interest in giving the lunatic evangelicals whatever they want, and they want a whole lot, you might want to have a click over to Religious Dispatches to read about Project Blitz. That’s enough to scare anyone silly.
I always find christians to be suspiciously concerned with who is fucking who. It’s almost as though they are “incels” who see controlling other people’s sexuality as a way of slightly increasing their own chances of getting sex. Or something equally disgusting. (The incels think they invented this strategy? Ha!)
Sadly, in my experience, the kids whose parents are willing to do so are the ones whose kids least need sex ed in school. It’s the kids whose parents have similar fucked up ideas or are plain embarrassed who need good sex ed in school.
I mean, even if kids listened to your abstinence only crap, if the programs had a 100% success rate of making kids abstain until marriage, where are they going to get accurate information once they’re married?
Giliell sadly you are right about the kids that will or won’t get education from their parents. I feel sorry for all of those kids getting the wrong information. especially for the girls whose lives will be alterred so much when they get pregnant and for the kids who will be born to immature parents who had other life plans.
Canada seems to be waking up to incels since Toronto (in mainstream media, at least -- I’m sure they’re nothing new, generally speaking), and I can’t really see the parallel to abstinence-only sex.ed. Seems the religious folk just want an excuse to send everyone to hell, not necessarily increase their chances of sex. They’re kind of the opposite: everyone should be voluntarily celibate (until marriage and then only for the babbies, heh, never mind what I do). Incels just seem desperate for any kind of sex without putting in any work on their side of the equation, as much as possible, and potential babies be damned.
I remember when, in my (entry level) environmental biology course, the professor asked the class to write down the two days of her menstrual cycle when a woman was least likely to get pregnant, should she have unprotected sex. I got called out in front of the 80-or-so students for giving an exceptionally stupid answer.
See, from the middle of my sophomore year in high school on, I’d attended a Lutheran Church Missouri Synod school. They taught us absolutely nothing. Sex was never even mentioned by the school employees (we students talked about it constantly).
I got the same from my parents. What I knew I learned from books or friends, and with the latter we never had any in-depth discussions about risks. “God, I hope I don’t get pregnant” “Yeah, be careful, because that would suck” –was about as deep as it got.
When I was in my junior year, 10% of the school’s population got pregnant. Those students “decided to continue their education elsewhere,” meaning they were told to leave. Still no sex-ed.
Probably a good thing I didn’t have sex in high school or college.
Vucodlak:
Probably was, you could have found yourself in all manner of trouble. That’s the thing with these lunatics, too, they insist on this shit, when it is proven, time and time again, that ab-only results in very high rates of STDs and pregnancies in teenagers, whereas the opposite is true when kids have comprehensive sex-ed. The kids who get good sex-ed tend to put off having sex more than those denied knowledge.
Caine,
I think they know that, they just see it as a good thing. High rates of STDs and teenage pregnancies means that the sinners are being punished and getting what they deserve. Comprehensive sex-ed means kids will know how to “sin” and get away with it. Suffering is good, knowledge is bad. That’s christianity in a nutshell.
Nightjar is absolutely right. One of the biggest mistakes sensible people make is assuming that evangelicals mean what they say in public. To them, the problem with teen sex isn’t disease or pregnancy, it’s that kids are sinning. The goal is to save souls, not prevent material problems. Since non-marital sex is a sin, adults who do anything other than discourage sex are facilitating sin, and so are sinning themselves. Disease and pregnancy are good things in that they can help discourage sex. I recall a video of a preacher in a closed meeting stating that the HPV vaccine was bad because girls who had it would think it’s safe to have sex. Even confronting them with the fact that statistically abstinence only doesn’t really work, if they’re honest, they will say that if it convinces only ¼% of kids to wait till marriage, that’s at least a handful of saved souls. That, to them, is more important than sparing them from suffering or even death.
ionopachys,
I wonder if they also see STDs and pregnancies as things that may get those teenagers to feel guilty, repent from their sins and turn to god. Thus, their lives would be fucked but their souls would be saved.
So, the group claiming to teach teens about making good choices gave itself a new name that is essentially pronounced “ass-end”.
Not sure they’re qualified to talk about good choices, unless the teens of today have much cleaner minds than teens of my era did.
Abstinence is actually 100% effective in preventing pregnancy and disease.
If you don’t ever do anything with your NaughtyBits™,
no NaughtyThings™ will happen to you. (cross my heart)
.
Unfortunately, none of them practice abstinence.
Because of having no information about anatomy or biology, they do not have the slightest idea of what they should be abstaining from.
If at first you don’t succeed and know you can’t keep trying again anyways because Jesus.