How-to manuals for teens?
Students who receive comprehensive sex education are half as likely to become teen parents as those who get none or abstinence-only sex education, according to researchers at the University of Washington.
There is substantial reliable evidence that abstinence-only programs fail to persuade young people to abstain from sex until marriage.
When youth schooled by abstinence-only programs do become sexually active,the programs’ anti-condom messages may actually discourage them from practicing safe sex, making the negative information the programs offer about contraception and disease prevention particularly dangerous. Such messages deny young people the opportunity to receive vital education to protect their health and well-being and, in particular, impede girls’ ability to avoid unwanted pregnancy and STIs to which they are more biologically susceptible.
President Bush, who is in Africa this week, is pushing Congress to renew his AIDS initiative.
President Bush this week implored Congress to renew his five-year, $30 billion global plan for AIDS relief -- including a core provision requiring that one-third of government spending go toward abstinence education.
Congress strongly supports the program generally, but many Democrats oppose the abstinence education requirement, saying it doesn't work. But the administration points to successes in stemming the spread of AIDS in sub-Sahara Africa.
Is abstinence enough? Should U.S. taxpayers be funding controversial abstinence education programs abroad? Does spending billions of dollars on AIDS prevention undermine other medical research and health care programs?
“Compassionate conservatism” has been justly maligned, but it may yet leave one lasting and worthy legacy.
That would be the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), begun in 2003, which George W. Bush asked Congress to extend for another five years. Funding for AIDS prevention and treatment has seen a spectacular rise under PEPFAR. While spending on global AIDS relief hovered just short of $1 billion annually during Bill Clinton’s last years in office, the Bush administration has tripled that amount, spending an average of $3 billion per year since PEPFAR began. Under the proposal announced last Wednesday, that figure would double to $6 billion per year from 2008 to 2012. This is, as the president noted Wednesday, “unprecedented -- the largest commitment by any nation to combat a single disease in human history.”
The late Rep. Tom Lantos of California, who until his recent death was chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, lambasted the PEPFAR opponents a short time before he died. He cited studies that "found that the abstinence-only earmark has forced a reduction in programs preventing transmission of the virus that causes AIDS from mother to child, has reduced prevention efforts with high-risk groups, and has undermined efforts to implement [prevention] programs."
With regard to the opposition to the integration of HIV/AIDS and birth control services, Lantos added, "this provision will ensure contraceptive assistance to HIV-positive women who wish to delay or prevent a subsequent pregnancy. Do the people objecting to this provision want to stand in the way of a sick woman trying to avoid getting pregnant?"
Links to Rocky Mountain News RSS feeds.
