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I want to say something about the recent report by Representative Hendry Waxman on so-called "abstinence only" sexual education programs, seeing as it's the big hot topic right now. Also, "abstinence only" sex-ed is something I feel strongly about, and this just makes it even worse. According to the report, 80 percent of information about reproductive health in these programs is simply false. They have disseminated lots of completely incorrect information, some of which is hardly believable, "including scrambling public health data to state that 50 percent of gay male teens have HIV and that HIV can be spread through sweat and tears, according to a recent Congressional report.""In one key example, the Waxman report accuses the FACTS abstinence-only curriculum, distributed by Northwest Family Services in East Texas, of stating that half of gay male teens are HIV positive.
The alleged claim appears to be a misreading of data from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention’s May 2002 report, “Young People at Risk: HIV/AIDS Among America’s Youth.” The report used surveillance data analyzed from 25 states with integrated HIV and AIDS reporting systems for the period between January 1996 and June 1999.
“Among young men aged 13- to 24-years, 49 percent of all AIDS cases reported in 2000 were among men who have sex with men,” the report said.
In short, the CDC found that 49 percent of the male teens with HIV in the study had had sex with men — not that 49 percent of all gay male teens are HIV-positive. |
U.S. Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), the senate’s only physician, stated publicly after Waxman’s report that the abstinence education materials should be reviewed. This, of course, is the same Bill Frist who was interviewed by George Stephanopoulos on This Week and had this to say:"STEPHANOPOULOS: Okay, let me switch to another subject. There was a bit of an uproar in Washington this week about this issue of these abstinence programs that are funded by the Federal government, the funding has doubled over the last four years but there was a report by the minority staff at the House Government Affairs Committee that showed that 11 of 13 of these programs are giving out false information. I want to show some of the claims they identified in the curricula. One of them was, one of the programs taught that "The actual ability of condoms to prevent the transmission of HIV/AIDS, even if the product is intact, is not definitively known." Another, "The popular claim that condoms help prevent the spread of STDs is not supported by the data." A third suggested that tears and sweat could transmit HIV and AIDS. Now, you're a doctor. Do you believe that tears and sweat can transmit HIV?
FRIST: I don't know. I can tell you ...
STEPHANOPOULOS: You don't know?
FRIST: I can tell you things like, like ...
STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, wait, let me stop you, you don't know that, you believe that tears and sweat might be able to transmit AIDS?
FRIST: Yeah, no, I can tell you that HIV is not very transmissible as an element like, compared to smallpox, compared to the flu. It is not, but the first slide, because I think it's dangerous to show that and then sort of walk away.
...
[after talking about other issues pertaining to the programs]
STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me just, I wanted to move to another subject, let me just clear this up, though. Do you or do you not believe that tears and sweat can transmit HIV?
FRIST: It would be very hard. It would be very hard for tears and sweat, I mean, you can get virus in tears and sweat but in terms of the degree of infecting somebody, it would be very hard. |
The Senate's only physician says it would be "very hard" to spreadk HIV through sweat and tears. You stew on that for a while.
Now, as far as this "abstinence-only" crap is concerned, it's obviously not a good idea. Sure, you tell the kids that you don't want them to have sex (until marriage), they promise not to do so, etc. However, not everyone wants to wait until marriage to have sex, and even those who might want to wait at 13 years old usually change their minds by like... say... 14 and a half.
Now, harm reduction is an interesting theory, and it's basically the theory I stand by when it comes to educating people on sex, drug use, and other harmful yet strangely popular activities. See, harm reduction is basically the idea that you should discourage these activities while providing the proper information necessary to reduce the harm inflicted on oneself and others (get it? "harm reduction") if the activity is still undertaken.
Using the harm-reduction model on sex-ed, for instance, the best solution is to inform children that staying abstinent until marriage (or at least until one has a trusted, caring, non-infested partner) is a good idea. However, you have to add some reality into the situation and explain that though you'd prefer abstinence on the part of said child, you understand that sometimes kids just have sex anyway. Hormones are powerful, and since at least some of these kids are going to probably have sex anyway, you tell them that if they DO have sex they need to take the right precautions, such as wearing condoms, getting tested, or at least using coitus interruptus. 
The argument against this idea from the abstinence-only crowd is that such education is seen by children as an invitation to have sex. Well, as I stated above, they're probably going to have sex anyway, and telling them to "just say no" will not only fail, but it also won't properly educate them. I've seen a multitude of statistics that say that children in abstinence-only education programs are actually MORE likely to get an STD or become pregnant, because they decided against abstinence AND weren't told how to properly protect themselves.
So, the primary question is this: what's more important, protecting the safety of these kids or ensuring that fundamentalism survives?
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