Abstinence-Only Sex Education Programs Abstain From Common Sense

An abstinence-only sex education advocate reacts to another round of teen pregnancy data.

Buried in the soggy pile of shit that is the Senate health care bill is a $50 million provision for abstinence-only sex education programs. To review, those are the sex ed programs that only teach teenagers to wait until marriage before they have sex, while generally avoiding any talk of condoms, birth control pills, and other tried-and-true forms of contraception. Not surprisingly, this “just say no” approach has been an abject failure. And why wouldn’t it be? The basic premise behind abstinence-only sexual education is this: teach hormonal teenagers to suppress every natural biological urge that tells them to fuck. This is an especially sick and cruel philosophy when you consider the fact that we live in a society whose citizens are continually subjected to an onslaught of half-naked men and women hawking everything from shampoo to light beer. The basic premise behind these is that the products make the owners of them more sexually desirable, i.e., more fuckable. And fucking is good. So not only is nature actively working against the abstinence movement; the culture is as well.

Of course, these are just preliminary ruminations on the subject. What do the statistical analyses indicate? They do not bode well for abstinence programs. In 2008, the conductor of a Johns Hopkins University study concluded “that abstinence-only sex education programs do not affect sexual behavior,” and that “federal abstinence-only sex education funds should be shifted to evidence-based sex education programs that teach birth control and have been demonstrated to delay sexual initiation and increase safer sex practices.”

One of the more interesting findings was that teens who took an “abstinence pledge” to wait until marriage before having sex were just as likely to engage in sexual activity as teens who took no such pledge. In addition, those who took the pledges were “less likely to report using a condom or birth control and more likely to report never using a condom in the past year. They were less likely to have used birth control during their last sexual encounter.” Why? “Virginity pledgers may be less likely to use condoms and contraception because many abstinence programs cause participants to develop negative attitudes about their effectiveness.”

Here’s a trivia question: which U.S. state has the highest rate of teen pregnancy? If you follow American politics, it should really take you no more than two or three guesses to answer this question. The answer is obviously Mississippi—without question America’s shittiest state, as it ranks either last or very close to last in just about every quality of life category possible. It’s the Haiti of mainland North America. If you’re ever asked which state has the worst health care, or highest obesity rate, or worst education system, or worst anything, your best bet is to say, “Mississippi” every time. Over and over again the state is even declared the “least livable” by Congressional Quarterly. The not-so-ironic kicker to all this is that Mississippi is generally considered the most religious state, which shows you how much good all that praying is doing them.

That Mississippi is extremely religious, stresses an abstinence-only approach in its public schools, and has the worst teen pregnancy rate, is not coincidence. It is established fact that the more religious states focus more heavily on abstinence and have higher rates of teen pregnancy. In Mississippi, schools are not required to teach sex ed. However, if they do, “in no case shall the instruction or program include any demonstration of how condoms or other contraceptives are applied.” That’s not a very sound policy considering that condoms are the most effective way for preventing sexually transmitted disease among people who choose to engage in sexual intercourse. Obviously, abstinence is the best way to avoid STDs and pregnancy, but as noted earlier, reality poses a problem for the abstinence-only crowd, which is mostly religious. And that’s no surprise, because reality always poses a problem for the religious.

Why do the U.S. Congress and others insist on funding and teaching abstinence-only sex ed? The short answer is political correctness. Traditionally employed by conservatives to describe everything from the enforcement of the Establishment Clause to the humane treatment of gays, “political correctness” is what’s preventing sensible sex education from being implemented across the board. The reality is that people—teenagers especially—are going to fuck, no matter what sexually repressed adults tell them. Plainly speaking, many Americans need to get off their crippled moral high horse and acknowledge the biological and cultural realities of the situation, which unfortunately for them do not comport with their backwards worldview.

- Max