Posts Tagged ‘stupidity’
BREAKING NEWS: Teens in abstinence programs having sex
December 6th, 2007 • chatter, idiocy
Tags: abstinence, stupidity
I know this is a complete shocker to everyone and it’s certainly a shocker for me. I thought this only happened to those kids that went to those crazy purity balls!
Decreased condom use and increased sexual activity are two likely explanations for the higher teen birth rate. But not all data supports those theories, said John Santelli, a professor of population and family health at Columbia University’s school of public health.
That guy’s a professor, probably with some fancy PhD. He gets to make jaw-droppingly obvious comments about why there are more teen births. More sexual activity? Why no, this would have no effect on increased birth rates. I would have never linked `sex – condom == more babies`. This man needs an award, possibly the Darwin award. However, the article does go on to state that many “experts” agree that abstinence-only programs are waste of money. I could have told them that solely based on the girls at my neighbor’s middle school (yes, that’d be 6th to 8th grade) that have gotten pregnant this year alone, even after having gone through the bulletproof and infallible abstinence-only sexual “education” class they’re required to take. 13 and 14 year old girls getting pregnant because they have no idea about contraception, shocking news indeed.
Conservative advocacy organizations (meaning Christian organizations) state contraceptive-based education is the reason for the increase in pregnancies. Jess made a very good point about this kind of backwards thinking:
It’s like teaching kids to drive cars. Teach them how to do it safely because no matter what you do, they’re going to do it anyway so at least give them the tools to do it safely and properly
Unintentional pun there but the point stands. Teaching kids nothing about contraceptives and telling them to “just wait until marriage” is very useful. Spreading ignorance is definitely not the reason standardized test scores are going down and we’re ranked right above Latvia in the recent PISA reports.
