2-19-05 Article: "Can our Students Abstain from Risk?"

I always wonder if the writers of articles about sex education ever look at actual curriculums. I have looked at a variety of curriculums and believe me 'lack too many details' easily applies to comprehensive programs.

Lets face it, the designers of all these curriculums include what they think is important for kids to know based on their own very basic beliefs.

Condom-based curriculums assume that adolescents will be sexually active because it is a natural drive. Therefore, teens need to be taught to engage in sex by reducing the very real risks through using condoms. Lessons can include trips to stores to explore the variety of condoms available and practice in putting on condoms correctly on bananas or other penile substitutes. Avoiding pregnancy is also a major tenet so varieties of contraceptives are covered. Another major factor is removing the discomfort of having serious conversations with partners. Role playing is important for building refusal skills, determining a partner's sexual motives, discussing sexual histories and testing/treatment of STD, and incorporating "safe sex" into their sexual activity. What is too controversial to handle in classrooms can be covered by directing them to websites. It is all very here and now. It is directed at the ineviability of having sex.

Abstinence curriculums assume teens can use their brains to subdue their sex drive. It concentrates on exploring rational reasons for a teen to wait to have sex until married. Curriculums stress taking a life view by setting goals: pursuing an education, career, marriage and family. It challenges students to look at how STD, a history of multiple partners, and unwed pregnancy can destroy those goals. Then it takes them through the character traits they can develop that will help them meet goals. It stresses that sexual abstinence is a lifestyle that ultimately works in a person's favor. The traits one uses to refrain from sex as a teen will be the ones that are used to be a good student, a trusted employee, a faithful spouse, a devoted parent and an empathetic adult. This is not "Just say NO". It is directed at what is ultimately best for people and society.

Condom/contraceptive education has been well marketed to appeal to parental desire to keep their kids SAFE. Thus, we get headlines like "Can our kids abstain from risk?" Abstinence education gets lamblasted for facts, statistics, and data despite the fact those things ultimately are not what influences kids the most. How many articles do we see that challenge abstinence curriculums for what they really do teach? None? Abstinence does not teach that if you aren't abstinent you are bad. It teaches that choices you make now can affect your future, putting choices in a lifelong framework.

Lorraine Latham of Planned Parenthood bemoans her organization's lack of access to students in some communities implying it is only because of conflicting funding. She doesn't mention that Planned Parenthood has its own grants/funding to put their curriculums and teachers in schools as is the case with MPS. In some places, parents and schools have looked at all curricular options and have decided that abstinence curriculums have more to offer.

As to research on outcomes: If condom education, the predominant curriculums in our schools, worked so well STD and teen pregnancy rates should have plummeted by now. There is absolutely no data to prove that any sexually active teenager who uses condoms and contraceptives escapes all STD and pregnancy over the course of their unwed teen and adult years. Remember some STDs take time to develop and the person has to have regular testing to prove they are not infected. However, no proof is needed for the abstinent teen who engages in no genital contact; it is virtually impossible to contract a disease or get pregnant.

The charge that ONE curriculum cites that "HIV can be contracted through sweat and tears" is a hopefully erroneous interpretation probably based on the new saliva test for HIV. Everyone should be getting an honest answer for a legitimate question--if you can test for HIV from saliva, how is it not passed through saliva?

Bottom line: Any lesson needs consistent repetition for it to be learned and assimilated. High School freshmen outscore seniors on surveys because they have fresh knowledge due to ninth grade health classes. But that knowledge tends to dissipate over the years, no matter what the message, unless it is reinforced and assimilated when it is most needed. Denied that opportunity, keeping teens abstinent for at least 18 months longer is an incredible plus for girls. As their reproductive systems mature, diseases can become less invasive and young women become more knowledgeable and responsible for their own health. Unfortunately, the latter is because of awareness of their friends' experiences rather than medical or educational intervention. If abstinence education achieves even this level of postponement, girls benefit. Curricular goals might have failed but girls are still better off.

"Treating partners may help curb STDs"

According to the news article, "People with chlamydia and gonorrhea are supposed to tell past sexual partners about their diagnosis and urge them to get treatment. A new study says giving the patients medicine to pass on to their...partners works even better." Now how could anyone object to this?

1. Antibiotics are being distributed without prescriptions, proof of their necessity, or assurance that they are used for the reason given. Are we ready for this precedent?
2. Most supportive legislation (including the unpassed WI bill) allows for dosage for only one partner. What if the infected person has had multiple partners?
3. The proof that this works--The gonorrhea patients were less likely to be infected at their 3 month checkup. This assumes only that those people were not reinfected by the partner who also took the antibiotic. Couldn't it also mean that they had not had any sex in those 3 months? A lightbulb goes off in some people when they get an STD--they get angry, they get guilty, or they get smart. It wouldn't surprise me that out of the 73% success rate, more than a few had taken time-off from sex
4. The success rate of infection was lower for chlamydia "because the antibiotics are less effective, especially for women, than the medication for gonorrhea". WOW!!!!
Does that mean women are fed another half-truth--their chlamydia is not resolved by a dose of antibiotic? Chlamydia is very dangerous for a woman and if it isn't eliminated by the antibiotic, and since it usually is asymptomatic, she rightfully could make the assumption that she has been cured when, in fact, the effects are progressing. Women obviously need to see a doctor and the docotr or clinic should make the contact to schedule her appointment. Should confidentiality trump medical necessity?
5. If a person has one STD, there's a good chance they have others according to the CDC. So if a partner is given the medication for one STD by a partner, s/he is never examined or tested for others which might be far more dangerous. Anything that keeps infected people away from a doctor is not a good thing in the long run.
6. The normal strains of gonorrhea are cured with an antibiotic (some strains are proving resistant as is being seen in Hawaii and California). The fact that gonorrhea rates are decreasing could therefore be attributable to the treatment of the disease, not the prevention of the disease due to a change in the causal behavior. It is important to understand this difference. The medical community considers this a victory. But there is always another STD around the corner for those who have multiple partners. The NIH study, confirmed by CDC, showed condoms significantly reduce gonorrhea only in males. Condom use is not the behavior change that benefits women; abstinence is.

Thank you, Polly Drew!

Ms. Drew gave any abstinence education advocate all the ammunition one needs in just one column! Yes, Polly, you do see nothing wrong with teen oral sex. You have swallowed the entire weird viewpoint of the most extreme sexologists in the country.

Citing the moral criteria of SIECUS (SexualityInformation and Education Council of the United States) is downright offensive. This is the organization built by the followers of Kinsey. The "US" in the acronym means nothing more than it exists in the United States--the organization has no other stature, no authority, no proven credibility. Yet, their comprehensive sex education keeps getting shoved down our throats.

In their terms, a moral sexual relationship is : "consensual, non-exploitive, honest, mutually pleasurable and protected against STI and pregnancy". No love, no caring, no commitment, no meaning and no positive outcomes. Sex is pleasure with a barrier. Anyone who says yes--no matter the age, the sobriety, the duress or any other state of mind of the participant--makes sex morally correct. That covers the unpublicized, Kinsey idea that any sex is good sex if a "Yes" is involved. Its the theory that allows a rape victim to be attacked in court for provoking the crime. Its what gives clinics the illegal pass to not report men who impregnate minors. Its what will come up again and again in Michael Jackson's trial--the verbiage "he loves children", "he wouldn't hurt any child" ergo sex with a child is loving and not hurtful.

Ooops! But to be fair--they threw in "non-exploitive, honest". Now just how does a partner know in advance if both of them meet that criteria? Oh, I forgot. Partners are suppose to sit down before sex and discuss their intentions, the number of previous partners, their history of STI testing and treatment, explain expertise with their birth control, read the condom package together to assure "correct usage" and then mutually incorporate proper use into their sex acts. Parents, that is what your kids are being taught to do. Role playing this scenario is incorporated into sex ed to make kids "comfortable" with safe sex.

Ms. Drew also seems to think that teens just came up with this idea to separate "fooling around", that can include oral sex, from intercourse. Teens didn't. Neither did Bill Clinton. It has been a systematic, ideological campaign. Websites, just like the cited www.goaskAlice.columbia.edu, have pushed "outercourse" to avoid pregnancy for years. Teens surfing the net for love and relationship advice, usually not sex, get googled right to these advice sites through clever metatags. Today, probably toned down by fear of legal repurcussions, they are prefacing everything with an "abstinence is best" disclaimer. But it is at these sites where teens are advised that showering together can be a fun, safe debut to their sexual lives. Oral sex as safe sex has been almost a motto. Only in the last few years, when evidence showed STIs were occuring in the mouth and throat, were condom warnings added.

Then Ms. Drew returns to her "certified" and "respected" sex therapist for further advice. How dare anyone assume that a human being cannot control a sex drive with sheer brain power. Without our intellect, we are just animals. Which, of course, is another tenet of the Kinsey crowd--primitive urges are natural and should not be controlled. The primitive sex urge in the brain stem and intelligence getting stuck far away in the cortex is alot of hokus-pokus to make people think there is a reason they don't have to use their heads.

Finally, Ms Drew defames teens' curiousity as what will lead them to earlier and more frequent experimentation with sex. All adults have to do is keep a step ahead of them with info to keep them "safe". That is the role adults now have? No guidance, no modeling, no rules, no standards. Just let teens follow their primitive urges and curiosity. Don't let parents have any say just in case they could have influence. The only "right" a parent has is to pick up the pieces when their child's life falls apart from recreational sex.

By the way, all the Scandinavian teens might be proving in their sexually "open" countries by waiting to have sex is that they are smart enough to see the destruction sex has wrought in their lives and their families. Our teens are just as observant even when adults like Ms. Drew and Ms. Foley want to hide those facts.

City Retains High Teen Birth Rate

#2 Again! Milwaukee has remained at the top of national teen birth rates for more than a decade. That is in spite of a series of campaigns, the efforts of local committees and agencies, and an escalating effort to put teens on birth control methods that do not require their vigilant responsibility.

There are two basic reasons for this: Teens are having sex and some teens want to have babies.
Why can't we just say both of these are wrong? They are bad for the teen, for her family, for the community, and, most definitely, very bad for the babies. A vicious cycle is in place and it will take more than bus ads and PSAs to stop it.

Abstinence should be a cog in the wheel of solutions. It makes no sense that it does not receive greater emphasis. Telling teens to refrain from sex will never be the be-all and end-all--too many social and economic factors are at work. But without abstinence as the foundational principle of all other efforts, nothing else has, or will, work.

It is devastating that OIC will lose Milwaukee's largest federal abstinence grant. Although its program was in its very initial stages, management deficiencies and criminality will give an undeserved black eye to abstinence education here. In the right hands, that money could have gone a long way to lower birth rates by showing teens much better alternatives.

There has to be a payoff for doing the right thing--maybe its time to invest more in the teens willing to postpone sex in favor of their education, job training and career launch.

"Viruses Added to Cancer List" 2/1/05

Its official! Hepatitus B and C and some strains of human papilloma virus (HPV) are now known carcinogens. Abstinence educators have been criticized for years for using this information as scare tactics to counter unmarried sex. Others chose not to use this well-documented information because it didn't have this final government stamp of approval.

In the case of HPV, the most prevalent STD in teen girls and young women, the avoidance of its link to cervical cancer has been unexcusable. Official brochures from a major area hospital have failed to mention that link in articles about cervical cancer. Young women who have had cryosurgery to remove pre-cancerous cervical cells sometimes were never told that the condition existed because of their sexual activity.

Maybe women will finally know the major reason they are advised to have annual PAP smears--to detect HPV. They will also understand why the new guidelines for PAP tests are more lenient for seniors no longer in sexual relationships or for those who are monogomous as evidenced by longterm test results.

Polly Drew's Sunday Lifestyle column-1/30/05

Miss Drew accepts that teens have, and perhaps should have, oral sex. Therefore, she admonishes adults to tell kids to use flavored condoms, dental dams, cut up condoms or plastic wrap. She even includes a nod to rappers who mention using a barrier during oral sex in their songs. Imagine the responsibility rappers are modeling for the rest of us!!!!

Its not heartening that a marriage and family therapist sees "protection" as the only issue here. In her questioning of her young patients, I hope she at least considers that their participation in oral sex could have something to do with their need of her services. We have spent several generations building the self esteem of girls and breaking down gender biases. Yet, no one seems to want to tell any young teenage girl that being on her knees with a boy's penis in her mouth was not the objective. The Ick factor of this type of casual sex has to be devastating to the teens and to their perception of what intimacy should be. I would hope a therapist would explore where they are headed with their "hooking up" behavior.

Then she advocates that people of all ages "must use a barrier every time they have any kind of sex" . Wow, lets take the most intimate, loving act--the act that binds a couple and brings children into this world--and lets put a barrier into it. But a condom won't be the only barrier. What about suspicion, fear, indifference and all those other emotions that ultimately will ruin the relationship. Is this what we really want sexual intimacy to become?

AIDS Transmission to Babies-1/31/05

What a wonderful story that HIV transmission to newborns is almost wiped out in the US. There is a drug, AZT, and there is voluntary testing of pregnant women. It shows what can be done when all levels of government put their minds to something. There is no downside to babies not growing up with HIV/AIDS or dying before their time.

Perhaps offering HIV tests as a prerequisite for a marriage license is another way to stem the spread of HIV. The couple, if one or both were infected, might discover it early enough for drug therapy to have optimal results. They could decide how to live with the disease or even whether marriage would be an option.