From The Washington Post
The nation’s campaign to get more teenagers to delay sex and to use condoms is faltering, threatening to undermine the highly successful effort to reduce teen pregnancy and protect young people from sexually transmitted diseases, federal officials reported yesterday.
And:
The new figures renewed the heated debate about sex-education classes that focus on abstinence until marriage, which began receiving federal funding during the period covered by the latest survey and have come under increasing criticism that they are ineffective.
“Since we’ve started pushing abstinence, we have seen no change in the numbers on sexual activity,” said John Santelli, chairman of the department of population and family health at Columbia University. “The other piece of it is: Abstinence education spends a good amount of time bashing condoms. So it’s not surprising, if that’s the message young people are getting, that we’re seeing condom use start to decrease.”
Proponents of abstinence programs dismissed the criticism, blaming “comprehensive” sex education that emphasizes contraceptive use.
“Contraceptive sex education does not provide practical skills for maintaining or regaining abstinence but typically gives teens a green light to activity that puts them at great risk for acquiring STDs or which serve as gateway-to-intercourse activities,” said Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association.
Others blamed the onslaught of movies, books, advertising and cultural messages that they say glamorize sex.
“The No. 1 movie that all teenage girls want to see right now is ‘Sex and the City,’ ” said Charmaine Yoest, a spokesman for the Family Research Council. “Our culture continues to tell them the way to be cool is to dress provocatively and to consider nonmarital sexual activity to be normative.”
This would seem to be an issue where a position on one issue, say the efficacy of abstinence education, would not determine, or even influence one’s position on another issue: whether out cultural gatekeepers should use greater restraint in depictions of sexual behavior. No?