Recently in Abstinence Only Category
We had sex ed in 6th grade and all I can remember is something about salmon spawning...which I think was a lead up to human spawning. In 8th grade we learned about birth control methods - the diaphragm is burned into my mind for some reason.
And that is all I remember. Fortunately, I had books and my better informed best friends for information and support. Note who's missing here...parents! My folks were fairly typical in their involvement in our sexual health education - and did the best they could. And I turned out okay, which is what most of you are thinking, right?
Anyway, sex ed at school is important. Really important, actually. This is because sexual health is a public health issue and if parents aren't taking care of business at home, kids need to get this info from some other trustworthy resource.
Pretty much everyone eventually has sex, some sooner, some later, most at about age 17 for the first time. 17 is young to be a parent. 17 is young to deal with an STD. 17 is young to be driving. 17 is just plain young.
But that being said, 17 is when our bodies are ready to roll when it comes to getting it on and those hormones and desire very easily take over our brains and reasoned thinking. Why not make sure kids are crammed full of info about waiting and prevention? Schools could be harping on this from about 3rd grade on, but they don't.
If parents were on it from kindergarten and kids were informed from an early age and crammed full of their parents values about waiting, etc, it wouldn't matter what was being taught at school. Parents have the most influence over their kids. School, not so much.
I don't mean to imply that school sex ed doesn't matter, it does, but it doesn't offer everything kids need to make great decisions about sex and relationships. For families that are on the ball, sex ed at school is supplemental to what they've learned from you.
For those kids who get less at at home, school needs to fill in the sex ed blanks. Once all kids have lots of information that is medically accurate, easy to understand, fun, normalized and actually helpful to them maybe we'll see a decrease in the teen pregnancy, STD and HIV rates.
Governor Gregoire signed into law a new Senate bill requiring state agencies to apply only for sexual health grants that fund programs which are medically accurate, effective and have shown real and calculable impact on participants.
The new law repeals a former state policy that required the Washington Department of Health to apply for Title V abstinence-only-until-marriage funding. Now the Department of Health can apply for funding for comprehensive sex education programs.
It looks like those Abstinence-Only programs are slowly but surely on their way out. After all, our own government determined they have NO impact on kids’ sexual decision making, so it doesn’t really make sense to throw money at something that doesn’t really work, now does it?
Great news from the Guttmacher Institute – the teen abortion rate has declined a whole bunch since 1974.
It’s dropped from 33% in 1974 to 17% in 2004. It took 30 years, but progress is progress, right?
The reason for the drop? Increased use of birth control and the availability of more effective methods. And for the record, the drop started before we had federally funded Abstinence Only programs, so we were already on the right track.
The only bad news in this good news is Black and Hispanic women obtain abortions at a rate 3 to 5 times higher than that of white women. Throw in a good dose of poverty, and the numbers increase.
Historically, these women are poorer and have less access to healthcare than the majority of white women – even white teenagers.
We need to think about what we can do to help young and poor women gain access to birth control. Voting for a candidate who sees the connections between poverty, access to birth control and abortion, is probably a good placed to start.
