|
For the low price of about $200 million a year, America buys blind “peace of mind” so parents can rest assure their children are moral enough to not do some form of “it.”
Abstinence-only sex education bears all the battle scars of a miserably failed experiment.
Those who say otherwise need to open their quaint eyes before
any more of this country’s religiously channeled “morality” is expended
on fighting against abortion instead of genocide.
If you want to believe your benevolent god will judge you
eternally for doing what comes naturally in a consensually naked
environment, you have every right to believe those things. No one can
stop you.
It just simply continues to fail me why 30 percent of our
nation’s sex education programs still choose to leave out information
about birth control and safe sex when it has been shown time and time
again these tactics do not work.
According to the Council on Contemporary Families, teens in the
United States start having sex earlier and have more partners,
pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases than their counterparts
in other developed countries that offer comprehensive sexual education.
American teenage girls are four times more likely to get
pregnant than teens in France and nine times more likely than those in
the Netherlands, the council’s study states.
In addition, gonorrhea infections among U.S. teens are far
higher than those among French, Dutch or German teens and HIV infection
rates for U.S. teens are 50 percent higher than in their European
counterparts.
Research in the American Journal of Sociology showed in 2001
that virginity pledges delay sexual intercourse for an average of 18
months (which doesn’t quite last you to your wedding day).
In addition, the study found young people who took “the pledge”
were one-third less likely to use contraception when they did become
sexually active than their peers who had not pledged.
The pledged virgins were also six times more likely to have oral
sex than non-pledges, and male pledges were four times more likely to
have had anal sex than those who did not pledge.
Without protection, these types of sex are just as dangerous as vaginal intercourse.
Those who maintain that abstinence-only education worked when
they were kids need only to look at the skyrocketing rates of STDs and
teenage pregnancy in this country.
Better yet, let’s examine the pious men and women who want to
preach against condom use in Africa or illegalize the recent human
papilloma virus vaccine on the grounds that it encourages premarital
sex.
HPV is the most common STD in the United States. The Centers for
Disease Control estimates more than 200,000 women die each year of
cervical cancer, which HPV causes.
Since when is withholding scientific information so people can make ignorant and guilt-driven decisions moral?
This is the same vein of thought that itches to force women to
unwillingly use their bodies as incubators for embryos that, at three
days, consist of a mass of 150 cells called a blastocyst (compared to
the more than 100,000 cells that make up the brain of a fly).
Your views of what constitutes human life, even if it is a
150-celled lump that cannot feel pain, are your own. But if you let
that lump grow to its full potential, kindly give it the tools it needs
down the road to make informed decisions about sex.
-Jillian Swords, a senior journalism major from Waxhaw, is a news reporter.
Trackback(0)
 |
TrackBack URI for this entry
Show/Hide comments
So explain to us all again why condoms are the panacea? Given that a very low percentage of high risk teens and adults use them, exactly how do you propose to inforce the use of the magic latex? Sure, schools teach elementary school children how to put a condom on a banana or a cucumber, but how who's really showing them how it works? Condom police perhaps? Big Government requiring registration and periodic checkins? Wait - no government in the bedroom or the womb - right? But its okay in the classrooms of impressionable children.
And how exactly does abstinence hurt? How does not having sex, showing restraint and respect for yourself and your partner, cause any pain or adverse consequences? Would it allow young couples to reconsider who they are spending their time with and planning a future - perhaps. Would it allow relationships of the emotional and mental type to build a strong foundation before the physical relationship? Probably. Would it reduce unwanted pregnancies? Surely.
I'll ignore your fairly simplistic view of human life and your comparison to the brain of a fly other than to say the fly probably has an edge on you.