| Abstinence-only sex education is just a ruse for excluding real sex education from schools. |
| Other developed countries focus much more on contraception. The upshot is that while teenagers in the U.S. have about as much sexual activity as teenagers in Canada or Europe, Americans girl are four times as likely as German girls to become pregnant, almost five times a likely as French girls to have a baby, and more than seven times as likely as Dutch girls to have an abortion. Young Americans are five times as likely to have H.I.V. as young Germans, and teenagers' gonorrhea rate is 70 times higher in the U.S. than in the Netherlands or France. Worse, there's some evidence that abstinence-only programs lead to increases in unprotected sex. Perhaps the most careful study of the issue involved 12,000 young people It found that [of] those taking virginity pledges…88 percent of the pledgers had sex before marriage. More troubling, the pledgers were much less likely to use contraception when they did have sex -- only 40 percent of the males used condoms, compared with 59 percent of those who did not take the pledge. Source: "Bush's Sex Scandal" by Nicholas D. Kristof -- New York Times -- 2/16/05 |
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