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Why not to rely on abstinence education
Mar. 11th, 2004 08:46 amSMH article:
Most American teenagers who pledged not to have sex before marriage did not live up to their vows, a study has revealed.
The teenagers also developed sexually transmitted diseases at about the same rate as adolescents who had not sworn off sex...
Of the 12,000 teenagers included in the federal study, 88 per cent of those who pledged chastity reported having had sexual intercourse before they married, Dr Bearman said at a scientific meeting in Philadelphia.
The researchers tested the participants for three common sexually transmitted infections - chlamydia, gonorrhoea and trichomoniasis - and found rates were almost identical for the teenagers who took pledges and those who did not.
Yet the teenagers who had taken pledges were less likely to know they had an infection, raising the risk of their transmitting it to others, the researchers said.
Dr Bearman said that telling teenagers to "just say 'no', without understanding risk or how to protect oneself from risk, turns out to create greater risk" of sexually transmitted diseases.
If people want to offer kids moral or emotional reasons for abstinence, that's their business. But let's not keep pretending abstinence education is going to protect kids from STDs in the absence of more comprehensive sex-ed, OK? (Let alone, as the current administration has done, trying to suppress information about the effectiveness of other methods of protection.)
In other news, seems the ADF went out and bought 59 heavy tanks that turned out to be just a little *too* heavy to be used in most likely scenarios, because they won't fit in any of our amphibious landing craft.
Well, I guess it's one way to reassure our neighbours that we have no hostile intentions...
Most American teenagers who pledged not to have sex before marriage did not live up to their vows, a study has revealed.
The teenagers also developed sexually transmitted diseases at about the same rate as adolescents who had not sworn off sex...
Of the 12,000 teenagers included in the federal study, 88 per cent of those who pledged chastity reported having had sexual intercourse before they married, Dr Bearman said at a scientific meeting in Philadelphia.
The researchers tested the participants for three common sexually transmitted infections - chlamydia, gonorrhoea and trichomoniasis - and found rates were almost identical for the teenagers who took pledges and those who did not.
Yet the teenagers who had taken pledges were less likely to know they had an infection, raising the risk of their transmitting it to others, the researchers said.
Dr Bearman said that telling teenagers to "just say 'no', without understanding risk or how to protect oneself from risk, turns out to create greater risk" of sexually transmitted diseases.
If people want to offer kids moral or emotional reasons for abstinence, that's their business. But let's not keep pretending abstinence education is going to protect kids from STDs in the absence of more comprehensive sex-ed, OK? (Let alone, as the current administration has done, trying to suppress information about the effectiveness of other methods of protection.)
In other news, seems the ADF went out and bought 59 heavy tanks that turned out to be just a little *too* heavy to be used in most likely scenarios, because they won't fit in any of our amphibious landing craft.
Well, I guess it's one way to reassure our neighbours that we have no hostile intentions...
