Telling People Not To Do It Just Doesn’t Do It 0
“Abstinence education” is a fraud and a sham that promotes STDs and out-of-wedlock pregnancy and wastes public money:
Now a new study has found that pledgers were less likely to protect themselves from disease or pregnancy by using condoms or other birth control methods. Moreover, five years after taking the pledge, 82 percent of pledgers denied ever having done so.
The issue is not that abstinence until marriage is bad. It is, by and large, a good thing. It is also, by and large, unheard of in real life.
Relying only on counseling abstinence to kids, without also teaching them what to do if they find themselves intentionally or accidentally no longer abstinent, is foolish.
Back in the dark ages, when I grew up, there was no such thing as sex education. There was no sex education in the schools and, for most persons I knew, there was no sex education at home, either.
We learned about sex the way God intended: in dark alleys and back streets and deserted cemetaries and dead end lovers’ lanes.
And every year, a few girls (and, in one memorable year, the school’s only young single female teacher) dropped out of school under mysterious circumstances.
I do indeed understand how parents may feel uncomfortable approaching the topic. Believe me, I sure do, even with grown-up children who are married and thus can be presumed to be “sex educated.”
Indeed, as far as I can tell, “abstinence education” satisfies the parents’ squeamishness, rather than the kids’ needs.
I conclude that the attractiveness of “abstinence education” stems from a desire on the part of parents to avoid talking about sex and their inability to remember–denial?–of what it was like to be 17 and have hormones.
Nevertheless, what makes the parents feel good and gives them the illusion of taking action while accomplishing less than nothing doesn’t help the kids.
(Plus, there’s something weirdly perverted about those purity dance thingees in a Humbert Humbert kind of way.)
Steve has more over at ASZ.
