Abstinance Only Sex Education Proves Ineffective Yet Again

A new Centers for Disease Control reports indicates that during the Chimperator's delusional reign when evangelicals drove sex education policy unwanted pregnancies and the transmission of STD's increased - in some case markedly. Sticking one's head in the sand and rejecting positive programs that have proven effective elsewhere is one of the signature idiocies of the Christianists. Science and objective reality are thrown in the trash bin as religious zealotry dictates all policy. Nor surprisingly, the Bible Belt region had the highest incidences of pregnancies and new HIV cases on a per capita basis. I hope Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention and the other professional Christians are proud of their handiwork. The larger public needs to roundly condemn the education policies of these flat earth types and let their elected officials know that they support a fact based comprehensive sex education policy in the schools. Here are some highlights from the Guardian:
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Teenage pregnancies and syphilis have risen sharply among a generation of American school girls who were urged to avoid sex before marriage under George Bush's evangelically-driven education policy, according to a new report by the US's major public health body. In a report that will surprise few of Bush's critics on the issue, the Centres for Disease Control says years of falling rates of teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease infections under previous administrations were reversed or stalled in the Bush years. . . . The number of Aids cases in adolescent boys has nearly doubled.
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The CDC says that southern states, where there is often the greatest emphasis on abstinence and religion, tend to have the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and STDs.

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Although the CDC does not attribute a cause, groups that support comprehensive sex education have seized on the report as evidence of the failure of religiously-driven policies that shy away from teaching about contraception in favour of emphasising avoiding sexual contact. Planned Parenthood said the CDC report is "alarming" and confirms that teenagers need "medically accurate, age-appropriate, comprehensive sex education".

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The Christian Taliban has no place in setting sex education policy in the public schools. Ignorance is not the way to reduce unwanted pregnancies and STD's.

More Young Women Educated in Religious Schools Have More Abortions

While at first blush this headline seems counter intuitive, but on reflection it makes since: abstinence only sex education doesn't work and leaves young women in schools that advocate only this approach are left ignorant of contraception methods. A new study published in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior confirms this fact. Overall, it is in keeping with the religious extremists' refusal to accept objective fact and studies that show that comprehensive sex education leads to reduced levels of abortion. And while many such schools are strenuously anti-abortion, they in fact help increase the number of abortions. Here are some story highlights:

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A new study published in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior shows that young women in their teens or early twenties who have attended religious schools are more likely than their peers to get an abortion, despite their beliefs. In fact, the research points out, these girls are more likely than those in the public school system to get pregnant without being too mature or married. The findings are very weird, because private religious schools, regardless of the god they promote, pride themselves in enforcing a very strict policy as far as contacts between their students go.

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For her research, the expert kept an eye on 1,504 unmarried and never-divorced young women in 125 different schools around the United States, aged 26 or younger. The goal of the investigation was to determine exactly how religious behavior influenced the young girls' decisions to have an abortion. Other studies have shown a strong link between religion and abortion attitudes, but this correlation has thus far remained largely unstudied.

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When analyzing the variables in the research, the expert learned that neither religious involvement, nor frequency of prayer or the perception of religion's importance has any bearing on the women's decision.
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“Religious school attendance is not necessarily indicative of conservative religious beliefs because students attend these schools for a variety of reasons. These schools tend to generate high levels of commitment and strong social ties among their students and families, so abortion rates could be higher due to the potential for increased feelings of shame related to an extramarital birth,” the expert concluded.