Amanda Marcotte discusses abstinence education and the conservative war on facts:
What needs to happen is basic reframing. This isn’t about who wants who to have sex with who when, but about who wants kids to be healthy, and who is resigned to letting them get sick. Which is all you’re going to get with abstinence-only. But it’s more than just what “works†better in terms of reducing STDs and pregnancy rates (though comprehensive sex education does), but it’s a philosophical question, too. The very idea that schools should be in the business of reinforcing ignorance instead of improving knowledge is a violation of basic American ideals. Abstinence-only is part of a larger right wing strategy of defining the mission of public education as propagandistic—who cares if you teach them things that are enriching or even fucking correct? The schools are there to preach conservative, white, Christian cultural superiority to a captive audience, in this view. After all, it’s not just abstinence-only that’s part of the agenda. It’s also teaching creationism in schools, and teaching a propagandistic view of history that whitewashes issues like slavery (and that the South seceded over it) and the Indian genocide. Which is turn is about producing another generation of idiots who get boners at the idea of more imperialistic war-mongering, well up until they’re a few years in and realize it’s stupid, you know, after it’s too late to do anything short of damage control. (See: Iraq War)
See the article here
What about all the STDs and teenage moms before abstinence education? Was that correlated to sex education and condom programs? Let’s try to be balanced here.
Real sex ed that talks about ways to prevent pregnancy and diseases even if heaven forbid you have sex seems to work much better than abstinence education, that seems to say that if you must have sex their must be consequences.
The sex ed. I received in public school in RI back in the 70s and 80s–and let’s remember that RI went for Kerry more than MA did–taught me about the consequences of sex without a condom. I think my sex ed. was representative, and yet teen pregnancies and STDs continued to increase in those decades of my teens and twenties. So please show me some type of data that showed me it worked.
And I’d offer up one of Robin Hanson’s musings to you in the meantime:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/12/baby-selling.html