Years of abstinence programs but higher pregnancy rates

Teen pregnancy rates have risen in the US by 3%, the first reversal in the downward trend that started in 1990. Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association, a group that only exists because of Bush redirecting money from your pocket into theirs, says the rise in pregnancy rates is "another opportunity to throw a barb at abstinence education." Abstinence doesn't need education. Abstinence is doing nothing and any idiot can do nothing. On the other hand, responsible sexuality takes information and knowledge—two things that religious loons think are dangerous even for adults.

For teens, 15-17, the pregnancy rate reached its highest point in 1990 and it steadily declined, year after year, until 2006 (the data for 2006 is what is now being released.) In 2006 it rose for the first time since the high in 1990.

Apparently all that government effort to stop teen sex hasn't worked. In 2007 the government crowed that teens were having less sex than ever before. The bureaucrats reported that in 2005 47 percent of high school students reported they were sexually active, down from 54 percent in 1991. The government said that lowering of reported sexual activity was good and that it lead to lower "birth rates." But teen pregnancy rates went up, not down. And by 2006 birth rates were also up.

Less sex is supposedly taking place but pregnancy rates are up. That would seem to indicate that what changed is that fewer teens are now taking precautions to avoid unwanted pregnancy—and for most teens being pregnant is unwanted. This would seem to verify the criticism of the abstinence programs that what they do is encourage reckless sexuality among teens.

The dilemma for the moral conservative (or immoral conservative, depending on your point of view) is that teens are having less sex but there are more pregnant teens. Perhaps sex education does "encourage" sex but it would seem to encourage responsible sex. And perhaps abstinence encourages less sex but it would seem to discourage responsible sex as well. So, is the choice between more teenage sex with less pregnancies or less teenage sex with more pregnancies?

If you can only have one or the other which should the conservative support? I guess it depends on whether or not the conservative in question actually cares about teens getting pregnant more than he is horrified by teenage sexuality. My guess is that practical conservatives, who worry because teen pregnancy creates social problems for the teen, will want less pregnancy. But the moralistic conservative, imbibed with "biblical morality" will think the sex itself is immoral and be thrilled that there is less of the "dirty" activity going on in general, even if the result is more ruined lives. And, when it comes to the social problems of girls becoming mothers, the moralistic conservative is likely to see that as nothing more than the "wages of sin,
" which are a good thing since they discourage "immorality."

I'm not surprised that years of government abstinence programs would lead to higher pregnancy rates. Couterprodutive results are often the result of government meddling. With that in mind I can't say I'm hopeful for the state of the middle class now that Obama has pledged to protect them. I've watched how government programs in the US "protect" kids and it isn't pretty. I've seen how we our government went in to Iraqi to "protect" people from Saddam Hussein. And I've seen how the drug warriors protect us from drugs and the travel Nazis protect us from terrorists. Perhaps we should just kiss the middle-class good bye now and get it over with.

Wasting tax funds on this clown...

This is what passes as sex education under Christianist control. This clown (literally} is paid to try to teach "abstinence" to high school students. And your tax money pays the bills.

The secret meaning of abstinence programs.

Theopublicans aren’t happy that parts of their religious agenda are being challenged. Bush got the idea from his lunatic friends in the fundamentalist Right that teens listen to government. You know teens and their famous respect for authority. It was decided that if government showered money on the Religious Right then these missionaries for morality could use the money to tell teenagers to stop having sex. And the teens would listen. It isn’t like they are soaked in hormones or anything.

But the New York Times reports that 11 states have rejected the Bush largess, and three more states appear to be passing legislation “that could kill, or at least wound, its presence in public schools.”

Of course, the abstinence-only lobby has been given hundreds of millions of dollars by the Bush administration, so they aren’t going to go silently into the night. Like every other parasitical special interest group, they don’t want the gravy train to stop.

They were not happy when a major study showed that abstinence programs had no major impact on sexual activity for teens. This report stated: “Findings indicate that youth in the program group were no more likely than control group youth to have abstained from sex and, among those who reported having had sex, they had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same mean age.” In fact, the study couldn’t find an real differences between teens who had “abstinence education” and those who didn’t.

At least that is better than anti-drug campaigns from the government, which have tended to increase drug usage

Of course, as things go, people change. Toady's teens are less sexually active than teens of a few years ago. But the theocrats in the schools can’t take responsibility for that. That trend started before Bush started flushing money down the toilet on his programs. More importantly, the number of teens becoming pregnant has decreased significantly. But studies show higher levels of condom use as the reason along with some change in what sexual acts are being used..

I find a certain level of irony in this. When the great authority figures in state education were pushing condoms, it was like pulling teeth to get a teenage boy to wear one. The government switches tactics and promotes abstinence instead, and the teens take to using condoms. Yet the government forbids these programs to teach about condoms.

Another trend noticed is that many teens who are considered virgins, due to the lack of vaginal intercourse, are anything but sexually inexperienced. Many teens use oral sex as a substitute for intercourse. One study showed that 28% of white teens, 15 to 17, had intercourse and another 19% had oral sex only. So 47% were sexually active. Among Hispanic teens 34% had intercourse while 14% had oral sex only, for a total of 48%. Sexual activity levels are similar but some apparently use oral sex as a lower risk substitute.

Bush and Co., are pushing conflicting messages, at least to gay teens. I know the fundamentalists insist that there are no gay teens. unless they were seduced--their vampire theory of homosexuality. But such teens do exist. Now think of a gay teen listening to the message that says he shouldn’t have sex until marriage. Then he listens to the Moron in Chief telling him that he should never be allowed to marry. Certainly the second message undercuts the first one. The reality is that he’s unlikely to wait for something he’s been told he can never have, so he may as well start now.

The other thing I note is that the rise in sexual responsibility that we have seen accompanied a decrease in religious sentiments especially among the young. The number of young people, who self-identify as atheists, has doubled during the Bush administration. I personally think Bush has discredited religion for an entire generation. In recent years the number of adults over the age of 25 who identify as atheists went up to 11%. Among youths 18 to 25, the number is now 20%. If these surveys mean anything, they seem to indicate that teens would rather trust a condom than a prayer. That could explain the decline in the teen pregnancy rate-- the abstinence programs don’t.

You would think that the failure of these programs would bother some abstinence educators. Perhaps it does, but some are unfazed. One of the more vocal advocates of abstinence indoctrination says she doesn’t care if the programs work or not. Pam Stenzel, a graduate of Jerry Falwell’s university, was a Bush appointee to a panel that set guidelines for installing the federal sex indoctrination program. She has made hundreds of thousands of dollars from her “abstinence courses” through the very programs she helped design.

She told one fundamentalist rally that “it doesn’t matter” if these programs work or not. She says that sex is sin and that is the truth she has to get out to young people. She sees abstinence programs as doing that. She asked her audience “to commit yourself to truth, not what works! To truth! I don’t care if it works, because at the end of the day I’m not answering to you, I’m answering to God!”

She says the problem isn’t venereal disease, or even teen pregnancy or HIV-- the problem is sin. She says the problem is a child “believing that they can shake their fist in the face of a holy God and sin without consequence”, resulting in that child “spending eternity separated from God”. The issue is that children must not be allowed to believe they “can sin safely”. The reason the abstinence programs exaggerate risks and refuse to tell teens about alternatives is because that is what they are designed to do. They are supposed to terrify the young into avoiding “sin” -- not educate them about human sexuality. In the minds of such theocrats, the programs are not failing. They are about spreading the fundamentalist message that sex is bad unless married, and that sin can ruin your life. That is what they were designed to do. Lowering VD rates, HIV infections, or reducing pregnancy rates were never the main goal of the theocrats.

Virginity propaganda does not work.

Abstinence programs in the government controlled schools are a feeble attempt, in fact a totally ineffectual attempt, to persuade teens to act completely different than their parents or grandparents acted when they were the same age. The idea of remaining a virgin until marriage is a religious ideal and thus not one that is common in reality.

A study of past sexual behavior of American adults shows that virtually all Americans have sex before they marry. Most, when young, lie to their parents about it. Apparently most, when adults, lie to their children about it. A government program, meant to lie to teens about this, is sold to the public as “telling the truth” to teens about sex. The federal government spends hundreds of millions of dollars to lie to teens about sex. Most parents are able to do it themselves at no cost.

A report by Dr. Lawrence Finer, Trends in Premarital Sex in the United States, 1954-2003, concludes: “Almost all Americans have sex before marrying.”

The Religious Right, which is notorious about lying about sexuality (I won’t mention Ted Haggard if you don’t) and one lie they spread is that premarital sex is something brought about by the “sexual revolution” of the 60s and that prior to this time Americans were chaste individuals. This goes along with their pretense that homosexuality barely existed as well.

What has happened in America is that premarital sexuality takes place at about the same rates as before but that teens become sexually active earlier. In additions a larger percentage of individuals don’t marry and marriage takes place about 3 to 4 years later in life. Under the Bush Administration’s fetish for abstinence this would mean that a quarter of all Americans are never supposed to have sex and the average America is supposed to go 13 years without sex --- from the time of puberty to marriage. So 13 years, no sex, sure that’s realistic.

Believing in unrealistic scenarios is par for the Bush administration hence their eagerness to flush hundreds of millions of dollars down the toilet to lie to teens about sex. Bush wants the feds to waste $207 million on such “abstinence programs” this year alone. Some $900 million has already been consumed.

Over 100 such federal indoctrination programs exist. The federal government usurps parental authority in order to promote a fundamentalist view of sexuality. Oddly, for decades, the Religious Right has been claiming that the government is not the proper instrument to teach kids about sex. Now that they are being paid millions of dollars to do the teaching for the government they suddenly don’t mind. It’s like the story of the woman who admitted she would sleep with a man for $1 million but is insulted when he offers her $100 and says: “What do you think I am?” His response: “We’ve already determined that now we are just negotiating the price.” The Religious Right, when millions in federal funds were waved before their noses, allowed their whoring tendencies to dominate and grabbed the money.

Under Bush regulations the sex “educators” are forbidden to tell teens about contraception. Many routinely lie about the consequences of sex or what is actually happening in the United States. The goal is to scare the kids into abstaining. The problem is that the kids are smarter than the “educators” acknowledge and know when some pious preacher is blowing smoke. They don’t believe it. But then their parents didn’t much believe it and neither did their grandparents. The net result is that even graduates of abstinence programs don’t abstain. T

In 1997 the Congress authorized a study that followed 2000 children “from elementary or middle school into high school” with about half the children going through “abstinence-only” indoctrination programs. The other half received the normal information given out to teens.

The Washington Post reports that when the study was concluded the average child in the study was not yet 17 years old and half of them had been sexually active with the average age for their first sexual encounter being 15 years old. Under US law that means most these teens broke they law and can be accused of sexual molestation and required to become registered sex offenders.

Fewer than a quarter of sexually active teens use condoms most of the time, a third have had two or more sexual partners. And the rates are no different for the “abstinence-only” students. The program did nothing. (This ought to be applauded as some government programs to discourage the use of illegal drugs seem to have the opposite effect.)

Sarah Brown, of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy said: “There’s not a lot of good news here for people who pin their hopes on abstinence-only education. This is the first study with a solid experimental design, the first with adequate numbers and long-term follow-up, the first to measure behavior and not just intent. On every measure, the effectiveness of the programs was flat.”

So the program doesn’t work. And the Bush Administration response? The same to every other fact of reality that interferes with their fantasies --- they ignore it. A Bush representative dismissed the study saying it wasn’t “rigorous enough” and then noted that the $900 million spent so far “is not that much money”.

To raise the $900 million squandered on these programs it would required all 900,000 residents of Tucson, Arizona to give the feds $1000. So a family of four would need to hand over $4000. All for a program which simply doesn’t work.

Something like 2% of condoms fail to work, a failure rate that the fundamentalists point to with horror, arguing it proves you can’t trust condoms and that birth control information is futile. Yet the failure rate for abstinence-only programs is 88%, that is 88% fail to abstain. That makes a 2% failure rate look fantastic in comparison.

But teen pregnancy rates are declining in the US. Why? It isn’t due to huge numbers of teens remaining virgins, that’s for sure. Instead the main reason for the decline is that more teens are using condoms -- the very contraceptive which the Bush Administration rules forbid discussing. Between 1995 and 2002 the US teen pregnancy rate has declined by 24% and 86% of the decline is attributed to contraception usage.

One thing is clear, when it comes to Bush and his administration, no matter the policy or issue under discussion, belief always trumps reality. The doctrine is clung to, no matter how much evidence accumulates to the contrary. A stubborn refusal to accept rational proof is the hallmark of the fundamentalist.