It doesn't work, yet we teach it more and more...

Abstinence-only sex ed finds few scientific fans
Birth control taught in shrinking number of schools, study says
Mike Weiss, Chronicle Staff Writer


There is no good scientific evidence that teaching abstinence to teenagers will by itself prevent unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, say the authors of a recent study. Yet they found that comprehensive sex education is declining and that more youngsters are being taught nothing more than abstinence.
As with similar debates over stem cell research and abortion, California and the Bush administration are at loggerheads over an ethical issue with far-reaching public consequences -- in this case, the best approach to sex ed for middle and high school students.
More than $1 billion in federal aid has been poured into state-run abstinence-only programs in the past decade after the Bush administration decided there was an imbalance that favored comprehensive sex education and slighted abstinence. State school systems accepting the federal money are required to teach that sexual activity outside marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects, and that a married, monogamous relationship is the expected standard.
California is one of only three states -- the others are Maine and Pennsylvania -- to refuse the federal education funding tied to abstinence.
The recent study, by a team of scholars at the Guttmacher Institute in New York headed by Laura Duberstein Lindberg, looked at instruction between 1995 and 2002 nationwide and found that "teenagers were significantly more likely to have received instruction about how to say no to sex than ... birth control methods" and that abstinence was being pushed in sex ed classes "in the absence of any substantial scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of the approach."
Published in the December issue of Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, a leading journal, the article attributed the trend to the federal funding, which since 1996 "has shifted toward programs that teach only abstinence and restrict other information."

more:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/11/MNG7VO2LUV1.DTL

"Faith based education" Bushco's approach to everything is FUBAR...

gather of a Saturday morning and pick up trash along the interstate, that's fine with me.

But they need to stay out of the public discourse on reproductive health.

By all counts they don't know much about it.

Catholic school in the 60s. Did I listen to them? Absolutely not. But then, I was aware enough to know that I had to seek out my own information on birth control, which I did. When I had my own daughters, I taught them myself, even down to discussing which type of the Pill I had used, side effects, etc., etc. It may not be easy for a parent to do, but I am grateful that my daughter did ask my advice without any coercion on my part.

It is a shame that our schools WON'T, but absent that, a PARENT MUST.

Maybe that's the goal--to create a permanent underclass who can never get out from under.

... by making them feel like shit, and justifying treating them like ass later on if/when they run into trouble as a result of bucking the controls these men set up.

Why people continue to attribute good motives to republican fucktards without the smallest bit of examination is beyond me.