Monday, November 22, 2004

Some interesting news from the US today. Young teen pregnancy is at a 50 year low. Of course, the idiots in charge of sexual health in the UK, who have presided over an epidemic of teenage pregnancy, abortion and STDs want to bury their heads in the sand. They cannot bring themselves to admit their whole strategy was obviously flawed when any fool could have told them that providing easy access to contraceptives and abortion would encourage young people to have sex when they are too young to be responsible.

The abstinence campaign in the US is obviously having an enormous positive impact which actually far greater than the figures show. While the intelligentsia sneer that 88% of pledgers do eventually have sex before marriage, they fail to realise that if they just keep the pledge until they are 18 or 20, a massive amount of good has been done. Once people are adults they become better able to handle sex and deal with its consequences. Axiomatically teen pregnancies go down.

It is just possible, though, that the success of the US approach, for which the lateral thinkers who challenged conventional wisdom deserve massive applause, will convince even the family planning mafia that they have had their day and must stop blighting the lives of young people.

4 comments:

Layman said...

Bede,

Basically, with the abstinence pledges you get all the benefits of "modern" sex education PLUS postponed sexual activity and fewer sexual partners.

Not to mention a large number of kids who actually do wait until marriage.

Of course, if abstinence reinforcement was broader than a few youth groups, then it might be even more succesful than it is. Our popular culture -- not to mention our education systems -- are actually hostile to the idea. Though there have been some more values centered shows (Seventh Heaven for example), most teen shows have the token girl who is a virgin and eventually feature her in the episode were she finally sleeps with a guy. Not only is the idea of virginity shown to be atypical, it's loss is shown to be inevitable. And the idea of GUYS actually postponing sexual activity? Forget about it.

Teen magazines are even worse. So too with the movies.

So it's not exactly a level playing field.

James said...

Thanks for that Layman. With so much working against abstinance, it is a miracle it has been so successful.

My favourite quotation, from memory, related to this matter is from David Aaronvitch of the Guardian (thus a dyed-in-the-wool liberal and atheist): "When I was a teenager, I was wholly in favour of teen sex. Now I have two teenage daughters, I'm not." Parents will surely side with the abstainers against popular culture - no parent could encourage their fifteen year old to get laid (well, I hope not). That is surely a significant force in our favour.

Anonymous said...

http://www.zmag.org/Sustainers/Content/2004-05/20monbiot.cfm
"In January the Sunday Telegraph claimed that Europeans "look on in envy" at the US record on teenage pregnancies. It supported this extraordinary statement by deliberately fudging the figures: running the teenage birth rate per 1000 in the US against the total teenage birthrate in the UK, so leaving its readers with no means of comparison.

Breathtaking as this deception is, it's not half as bad as what Bush has been up to. When his cherished abstinence programmes failed to reduce the teenage birthrate, he instructed the US Centers for Disease Control to stop gathering data. He also forced them to drop their project identifying the sex education programmes which work, after they found that none of the successful ones were "abstinence-only".

Bush should also hope that we don't look too closely at his record as governor of Texas. He spent $10m on abstinence campaigns there, with the result that Texas has the 4th-highest rate of HIV infection in the Union, and the slowest decline of any state in the birthrate among 15-17 year-olds."
Lying Christians? How unusual! :D

Why don't you just admit that you think sex i evil and be over with it? You don't care that the abortion rate is the lowest in countries with proper sexual education like the Netherlands because you think sex is a horrible sin. If people have sex before marriage they go to hell just the same as if they had an abortion. Therefore Christians hate sex ed.

If sex is only for reproduction then riddle me this: what is the argument for not surgically removing womens clitoris' at birth? That way they won't be tempted to engage in evil dirty sex.

Also mastrubation rules!!!

Anonymous said...

Teenage pregnancy in poor parts of the Wirral is seven times higher than in richer parts of the Wirral.

Money seems to be a much bigger factor than sex education.