Peripheral Damage

A report that is being posted throughout media outlets this morning concerns what happens to youths who are given sex education slanted toward abstinence. The incidence of use of protection is quite naturally higher among those who are given information about prevention.

There were no statistics in the study for actual pregnancies and contraction of disease. As I recently reported, in Dallas, rising AIDs occurrence is leading the City Council to reconsider its prevention of public health workers' distributing condoms.

The sadly recidivist trend in winger circles is damaging children affected in more than just their homes. When community attitudes force schools to shutter down education, in many fields, the future of this country is damaged as well.

The study is the latest to raise questions about programs that focus on encouraging abstinence until marriage. The findings also reignite the debate about the effectiveness of abstinence-focused sexual education just as lawmakers are about to reconsider the more than $176 million in annual funding for such programs.

Rosenbaum analyzed data collected by the federal government's National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which gathered detailed information from a representative sample of about 11,000 students in grades seven through 12 in 1995, 1996 and 2001.

Rosenbaum focused on about 3,400 students who had not had sex or taken a virginity pledge in 1995. She compared 289 students who were 17 years old on average in 1996, when they took a virginity pledge, with 645 who did not take a pledge but were otherwise similar. She based that judgment on about 100 variables, including their attitudes and their parents' attitudes about sex and their perception of their friends' attitudes about sex and birth control.

By 2001, Rosenbaum found, 82 percent of those who had taken a pledge had retracted their promises, and there was no significant difference in the proportion of students in both groups who had engaged in any type of sexual activity, including giving or receiving oral sex, vaginal intercourse, the age at which they first had sex, or their number of sexual partners.

There is a tragic difference between the parenting that informs children of facts and that that seeks to indoctrinate children in a particular religious pattern. The adolescent stage for all children includes resistance to whatever background they are familiar with. When they have been given rational patterns to follow, they will find their way to facts that will help them make decisions they will benefit from. When all they have been given is prejudice, of any sort, they start from so far behind that they may have any amount of trouble finding out what works for them.

Caring for children demands intelligence, and hopefully studies of the sort reported here will help guide parents away from the doctrinaire approach that damages their own family.

My direct experience with parents who put their religion above their children in importance do deep and lasting damage - particularly to 'family values'.