Safe Sex Lies
By La Shawn Barber (01/28/04)
Warning: This column contains explicit references to Jesus Christ.
What's the surest way to increase a teenager's risk of incurable diseases, cervical cancer, pregnancy, infertility, abortion, a broken heart, a jaded view of love and marriage, and doom a child to poverty and fatherlessness?
Teach her how to put a condom on a cucumber.
Despite all these risks and many more, taxpayers spent 12 times more promoting so-called safe sex education than abstinence in 2002, according to a new report released by the Heritage Foundation. Taxpayers contributed $1.73 billion to "safe sex" programs and $144.1 million on abstinence education.
What's not being widely reported is that increased abstinence education is a major cause in the drop in pregnancy and birth rates among teenagers. Among unmarried girls between ages 15-19, increased abstinence education accounted for a 67 percent decrease in pregnancy rates. In other words, the decline in pregnancy rates among teens is due to a reduction in the proportion of sexually active girls, not to the increased use of contraception, according to an April 2003 study published in Adolescent and Family Health.
Abstinence education works. Under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996--the welfare reform bill--Congress authorized $50 million of federal funds annually for five years to states to promote abstinence until marriage under Title V of the bill. The welfare reform bill is up for renewal this year.
To receive funding under Title V, states are required to fund education that has "as its exclusive purpose, teaching the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity." Other requirements include teaching that abstaining from sex until marriage is the expected standard for all school-age children and that out-of-wedlock child-bearing is likely to have harmful consequences for the child, the child's parents and society.
Liberals will likely push for more funding for "safe sex" education. Several Democrats have already tried to eliminate funds for abstinence programs and will attempt to do the same this year. They support thinly-disguised soft pornography "education", such as "Abstinence Plus", where children as young as 11 are shown how to put on condoms, taught how to masturbate, read erotic material and other things no 11 year-old should even be thinking about. For example, Centers for Disease Control--supported by your tax dollars--promotes programs that teach how to apply lubricants (they suggest grape jelly, maple syrup and honey).
I can hear liberals now: "Get out of the Dark Ages! It's unrealistic to expect teenagers to not have sex until they're married." I agree. Youth surrounded by sexual permissiveness shouldn't be expected to abstain; they need to be taught. If they're taught to avoid the risks of drinking and drug use and about the harmful effects of smoking, why can't they be taught self-control in the area of sexual activity?
Even abstinence education has limitations. In government-run schools, the ultimate authority for abstaining from sex until marriage can't be taught. With the strict (and misunderstood) separation between church and state and the domination of secularism and humanism, the basis for abstaining until marriage is obscured.
Ours is a religiously pluralistic society, and a biblical view of abstinence can't be promoted in government-run schools. In the Bible we're warned, "Flee sexual immorality. Every sin that a man does is outside the body, but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body" (1 Corinthians 6:18). The pleasure of the sexual relationship is one of God's many gifts, but He restricted this gift for the sanctity of our bodies and our families.
Within marriage, sex is an integral part of the expression of love between spouses and the vehicle for procreation. God's original and enduring plan for marriage is a man and a woman entering into a sacred union to honor Himself and to reflect His Son Jesus Christ's relationship with us.
According to the latest Zogby poll, 75.3 percent of parents disapprove of the CDC's sex education curriculum (remember the grape jelly?) and 73.5 percent approve of abstinence-centered education. Parents intuitively know the destruction of early sexual activity; they don't need numbers and studies. Showing teenagers how to put condoms on cucumbers is only the beginning of what could turn out to be the worst decision they've ever made. God knows what He's doing.
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