Loving Our Children

BRIAN KLEPPER

First published on THCB.

 

New data clearly show that one in four American teens have at least one sexually transmitted disease. One in seven have more than one. A refusal to confront this news directly by changing the abstinence-only sex education policies of the last decade is tantamount to child abuse.

Among its many less-noticed accomplishments, this Administration has strangled funding for comprehensive sex education. Instead, it has thrown the immense weight of the US government behind abstinence-based education, an impractical ideological approach rooted in religious zealotry and a romantic notion of social mores that no longer exists for most young Americans. In 2005 and 2006, the Bush Administration spent $170 and $178 million, respectively, more than double the 2004 expenditure, much of it allocated to mostly conservative Christian organizations, to encourage children to refrain from sex without explaining the fundamentals of contraception and sexually-transmitted disease (STD). In 2004, a Minority Staff Special Investigations report prepared at the request of Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) found that more than 80 percent of federally funded abstinence programs contain false or misleading information about sex and reproductive health.