It shouldn't be about waiting until Marriage, but when a person is in a stable, solid, long-term relationship, one with the characteristics "marriage" claims.
My health book applauds abstinence, and I despise it, because the very teens who are at risk for STD's and pregnancies are not going to stop. "Not having sex is the only effective way to prevent STD's" (there's still other ways to contract them, such as HIV from blood). Adults assume teenagers and children all have the same mentality, that applying a rule to all will improve things when the few fools making these mistakes do not learn. I'm glad the teaching of contraceptives is used, but another positive is to explain the process of fertilization, ovulation, and myths about avoiding pregnancy. Encourage them to have their partner tested, being honest about their previous sex partners, if any, and learning about symptoms of sexually transmitted diseases.
And paul.bill66, seriously? You're just instilling paranoia 1). Not ALL boys carry that ideology, and there are girls who want sex, too (such as I). 2). Octomom was artificially fertilized. .
Sex is pleasurable to us, too. When will you realize that your child is not everyone else's?
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Just Saying No to Abstinence Ed
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The vast majority of public-health experts, however, seldom discuss sex education and marriage in the same sentence. They gauge success by pregnancies prevented, germs not contracted, and kids who enter adulthood with a healthy view of sexuality. The public-health community views a wait-until-marriage message as blind to the world most teens inhabit. The average age of matrimony has steadily climbed, and is now past age 25. (Which is probably why 95 percent of Americans don't walk down the aisle as virgins.)
For all the rancor, the two sides do have points of intersection. Both believe parents and other adults in a child's life should take an active lead in shaping adolescent sexuality. They know that most parents don't want their teenagers having sex, and that about two thirds of kids who have sex say they wish they had waited.
Both camps claim the side of science. But science is, in fact, where the abstinence community finds itself outgunned. In many ways, the wound is self-inflicted: when the abstinence movement was starting to congeal a decade ago, federal funding agencies did not place a priority on evaluation. Many early leaders, motivated more by enthusiasm than science, actually downplayed the need for research.
A decade later, few studies have documented changes in behavior following abstinence education. One scientifically rigorous, $8 million evaluation didn't find any difference in the age of first sexual intercourse. In another recent report, a review of 56 studies for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, researcher Doug Kirby found favorable data for three abstinence programs, but he says the evidence is only weakly supportive.
Tonya Waite knows her curriculum didn't have the kind of studies that could hold up scientifically, and she never had the budget or expertise to get them. Without research, she says, "How do you truly judge years of performance?"
The issue now is whether public money should keep flowing to any abstinence program, given that few have any more scientific justification than Virginity Rules did. Comprehensive education is attached to a larger body of research, including studies finding that these programs may not only improve contraceptive use among teens, but lead to some of the same goals sought by abstinence advocates: delay of sexual initiation and a reduction of partners.
In truth, kids turn to sex for many reasons. Schools should address healthy sexuality and contraception, but so should parents, pediatricians, the media and every influence in a teenager's world. To take root, the message of delaying needs to infiltrate homes, classrooms—possibly even billboards. "You're going up against a lot of pop culture telling you sex is something you can throw away," says April Ford, who as Miss Teen Texas, starred in the billboard of pageant-winning virgins. An east Texas native, she used her 2005 crown to convince school groups that abstinence isn't lame. "If you have people out there who visually look exactly like what you see on MTV and the movies, it's going to have an effect," she says. An effect that she hopes will outlast Virginity Rules.
With Suzanne Smalley with McCain
© 2008
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