The Society for Adolescent Medicine sounded the alarm once again this month about the problems with government-funded abstinence-only programs in a comprehensive report. Not surprisingly, the findings aren't good.

A little more than a year ago, Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Los Angeles, sounded this alarm in a study that found "false, misleading or distorted information" in the programs' teaching materials. Youth participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs, for instance, frequently received medically inaccurate or misleading information, often in direct contradiction to the findings of government scientists. They had been taught, for example, that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person's genitals "can result in pregnancy."

Read that last paragraph again. This stuff is being taught in our public schools as fact.  Just the gay bashing phrase alone should warrent a red flag.

The society's new report, published in the latest issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, charges that "current federal abstinence-only-until-marriage policy is ethically problematic, as it excludes accurate information about contraception, misinforms by overemphasizing or misstating the risks of contraception and fails to require the use of scientifically accurate information while promoting approaches of questionable value." Furthermore, the report notes that the policy threatens "fundamental human rights to health, information and life."

Read that last sentence again: "Fundemental human rights to health, information, and life".

Essentially, in permitting the faith-based teachings of sexual education to permeate our schools, we are endangering the health and lives of our children.

The article continues:

Responding to the latest review of abstinence-only programs, James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, stated last week: "The report reads like an indictment. Abstinence-only is bad science, bad policy and a blatant violation of medical ethics and basic human rights. [emphasis mine] Enough is enough. The time has come for Congress to declare an immediate moratorium on federal funding for these programs. It is a national scandal that we have already spent over $1.1 billion of taxpayers' dollars on programs that don't work and that censor vital public health information for young people."

Federally funded abstinence-only education programs, which have enjoyed exceptional support and growth since 1996, have "educated" several million youth and are funded to the tune of $170 million a year, are not only grounded in bad science and subject to political whim, but they also don't offer what American parents say they want their kids to be taught.

A 2004 poll by National Public Radio, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government found that 93 percent of Americans say sex education should be taught in schools and that, except for some geographical "pockets of controversy," there is little debate about what kind of sex education should be taught.

So, it's clear that the vast majority of Americans think that our kids need to know about sex, and how it ought to be taught. Why aren't we pushing back?

Here's what the federal government has listed as guidelines for abstinence only sex-ed:

The federal definition of an eligible abstinence-only education program is one that:

    * has as its exclusive purpose, teaching the social, physiological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity;
    * teaches abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage as the expected standard for all school age children;
    * teaches that abstinence from sexual activity is the only certain way to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and other associated health problems;
    * teaches that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity;
    * teaches that sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects;
    * teaches that bearing children out-of-wedlock is likely to have harmful consequences for the child, the child's parents, and society;
    * teaches young people how to reject sexual advances and how alcohol and drug use increases vulnerability to sexual advances; and
    * teaches the importance of attaining self-sufficiency before engaging in sexual activity.

And what fills the vacuum of ignorance about sex and sexuality in the absence of actual in-depth education? Here are some things that teens believe:

I can't get an STD if I have oral sex.
 I'm having my period, so I can't get pregnant.
If I have oral or anal sex, I'm still a virgin.

There has been a bit of exposure and push-back in the religious domination of teen-abstinence programs. The most recent example is the Silver Ring Thing, which was federally funded until the ACLU sued the government over its violation of the Establishment Clause.

The bottom line is that the lives and health of our young people -especially our young women- are in danger because of the deliberately misleading  things taught by government funded groups. We need to stand up for our kids and stand up to the enroachment of sexual ignorance that will harm them.  

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