Conservatism reigns in Croatia

Pete Chagnon - OneNewsNow -

Abstinence education is celebrating a legal victory in Croatia.

Roger Kiska of the Alliance Defense Fund says the case was particularly dangerous because it involved a charter body of the Council of Europe. That body polices compliance with the European Social Charter -- a binding human-rights document on all states within the Council of Europe.

The case involved a lawsuit against the Christian nation of Croatia, which Kiska says has a low rate of teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. The suit alleged that the country was not teaching appropriate sexual education in their schools because they focused on abstinence.

"So the potential of this case was to completely liberalize sexual education throughout Europe," he explains. "And thankfully the committee agreed with our arguments, agreed with the arguments of Croatia, that because of the cultural sovereignty of Croatia, because of the low prevalence of sexual transmitted diseases and teen pregnancies, obviously the program was working" the attorney notes.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=660524

Abstinence, yes, but what about marriage?

Carolyn Moynihan

The abstinence-until-marriage movement in the United States has been a positive and courageous response to the sexual revolution. As the basis for sex education it has met with determined opposition because of adult scepticism, and probably dislike of the very idea of abstinence. Now a sociologist who is also an Evangelical Christian is suggesting another reason for reviewing the way Christians promote abstinence.

…[A]fter years of studying the sexual behavior and family decision-making of young Americans, I've come to the conclusion that Christians have made much ado about sex but are becoming slow and lax about marriage—that more significant, enduring witness to Christ's sacrificial love for his bride. Americans are taking flight from marriage. We are marrying later, if at all, and having fewer children.

http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/abstinence_yes_but_what_about_marriage/

'I need to wait'

Christopher Blunt

Surprisingly good messages about teenage sex and parenthood surface in an MTV series.
Culturally conservative messages about premarital sex have surfaced in an unusual place: MTV. The music-television network’s new reality series, 16 and Pregnant, follows sixteen-year-old American girls through five to seven months of their pregnancies and the experiences of young motherhood.
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/i_need_to_wait/

Simmering sex-ed battle heats up

In 2007, the group (Free to Be) received approximately $540,000 in federal funding from the Community-Based Abstinence Education Program under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, according to federal tax forms filled out by the nonprofit.

To receive that money, groups must abide by federal guidelines that include teaching “that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity . . . that sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects . . . that bearing children out-of-wedlock is likely to have harmful consequences for the child, the child’s parents, and society.”

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20090607/ARTICLES/906079971/1350?Title=Sex-ed-battle-heats-up

Fewer U.S. teens report being sexually active

By Anne Harding
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The percentage of U.S. teens having sex showed a "dramatic" drop between 1992 and 2002, while there was a similarly striking rise in the use of contraception by those who were sexually active, a new analysis of national US data shows.

However, very recent increases in teen pregnancy -- after a decline lasting more than a decade -- show that more work needs to be done to help improve teens' reproductive health, according to Dr. Jennifer Manlove and colleagues from Child Trends in Washington, D.C.

http://health.yahoo.com/news/reuters/us_teens_sexual.html

Abstinence ed 'outperforms' comprehensive sex ed

Pete Chagnon - OneNewsNow -

According to a research analyst, comprehensive sex education does not outperform abstinence education.

Irene Ericksen of the Institute for Research and Evaluation says that media reports continually claim that abstinence education is a failure and that comprehensive sex ed is the only way to reduce teen pregnancies and promote safe-sex practices. She adds that they continually site a federal study that is riddled with myths and did not find abstinence education effective.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Education/Default.aspx?id=533758

Obama would ax abstinence-only funding

Jim Brown - OneNewsNow -

If Congress approves President Obama's budget requests, there will be no more federal funding of abstinence-only education programs.

Barack Obama has recommended completely zeroing out Title V abstinence programs to states, as well as abstinence education programs to community-based organizations (CBAE) and replacing them with more than $100 million for contraceptive-based sex-education programs. The massive omnibus bill signed by the president had already reduced funding to abstinence programs by $14 million.
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Politics/Default.aspx?id=522676

NC's 'Healthy Youth Act' healthy in name only

Charlie Butts and Jody Brown - OneNewsNow

The vast majority of North Carolina school districts teach abstinence until marriage -- but one family advocate in the Tar Heel State says a backdoor approach is under way in the legislature to push an agenda that promotes promiscuity.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Politics/Default.aspx?id=466794

NC keeps abstinence education

Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow

While some states are dropping abstinence education, others will continue to use it -- including North Carolina.

School districts can teach either abstinence or comprehensive sex education, the latter of which Jere Royall of the North Carolina Family Policy Council believes encourages promiscuity. He tells OneNewsNow that abstinence education has proven itself.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Education/Default.aspx?id=449216

Obama asked to keep abstinence education funding

Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow

The campaign to retain federal funding for abstinence programs in public schools continues.

The Obama administration supports what is called "comprehensive sex education," which Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association believes encourages young people to be sexually intimate. She fears losing federal abstinence funding but notes her organization has found that many lawmakers, when informed of the truth about abstinence education, will listen.

Continue...

Abstinence-education funding likely to get the axe

Charlie Butts and Marty Cooper - OneNewsNow - 1/20/2009

Conservatives in Congress are trying to plan ways to keep funding for abstinence education while working in a liberal atmosphere. In an article in the Spectator, David Bass of the John Locke Foundation believes Washington has a phobia of abstinence education. Funding for it runs out on June 1, and Bass believes the new president will then support abstinence-plus programs.

Continue...

The long-term consequences of the hook-up culture

By Colleen Carroll Campbell

Once confined to dorm-room gossip sessions, salacious details about the hook-up culture on today's college campuses have become fodder for serious sociological analysis.

No fewer than four books on the topic have been published this year alone. Among them are sociologist Kathleen Bogle's unflinching investigation of campus sexual norms in Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laura Sessions Stepp's alarming analysis of promiscuity's emotional costs in Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both.

Continue...

'Safe-sex' ed not working - abstinence ed necessary

Pete Chagnon - OneNewsNow - 1/15/2009

A pro-family advocate says a recent study on teen births in the U.S. makes the case for more abstinence education.

The latest Centers for Disease Control study on teen birth rates in the U.S. showed a slight uptick for the year 2006. Mississippi led the nation in the percentage of teens giving birth, while New Hampshire had the fewest.

Continue...

Abstinence - more than just a pledge

Allie Mohler - OneNewsNow - 1/9/2009

A leader in the Southern Baptist Convention is speaking out about a recent study that said teenagers who take abstinence pledges are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who don't take such pledges.

Late last month, the federal government released the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which surveyed around 11,000 students in grades 7-12 over a period of years. According to the study, researchers found that more than half of the young people became sexually active before marriage, regardless of whether they had taken an abstinence pledge.

Continue...

Political Science

Tis the season to bash abstinence education. Every season, in anticipation of budget quarrels over abstinence ed vs. comprehensive sex ed, you can count on a new study to come out claiming that children are harmed by abstinence ed. This year's entry was reported in the Washington Post.

The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before marriage regardless of whether they had taken a "virginity pledge," but that the percentage who took precautions against pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases was 10 points lower for pledgers than for non-pledgers.

"Taking a pledge doesn't seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior," said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose report appears in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics. "But it does seem to make a difference in condom use and other forms of birth control that is quite striking."

The study is the latest in a series that have raised questions about programs that focus on encouraging abstinence until marriage, including those that specifically ask students to publicly declare their intention to remain virgins.

However, a virginity pledge is a one-time promise, not a comprehensive program designed to give kids enough information to change their minds and enough activities to change their behavior. Kathryn Jean Lopez, editor of National Review Online, reports her conversation with Valerie Huber:
The National Abstinence Education Association disputed the whole premise of the study, using this obvious tack. Its executive director, Valerie Huber, remarked to me in an e-mail interview: "The author inaccurately equates the holistic breadth of an abstinence education program to the one-time event of a virginity pledge. A pledge and an abstinence program are not synonymous."

KayLo continues:

Does that mean we pass out condoms at school because we're not going to change the culture anytime soon? No. It means kids need support and reasons engage in activities other than sex. Abstinence has to be about saying "yes" to something in order to work. We need to focus on the idea that kids can actually think, and should want more from a relationship than sex. We need to be open to programs that aren't all about copulation, but about character education.

Because, as Huber and others have noted, building strong lines of parent-child communication while developing and maintaining a sturdy ethical core helps kids immensely when it comes to keeping their pants on.

IN other words, we need something like comprehensive abstinence education, that does more than yammer about sex, but which helps kids in the whole of their lives.
I actually prefer to think of it as Comprehensive Marriage Education, which prepares kids for married life, and gives them something to look forward to. I've seen communities that create that kind of supportive environment and it does work. I've written about them here and here. Unfortunately, these kinds of communities are too much like cocoons in today's day and age. That kind of overall support system for sexual restraint and marriage preparation needs to be much more wide-spread than it is now.

Now You Tell Us, continued

I turned the previous post by that name into a full-fledged article, over on townhall. Stuff in the townhall article that wasn't in my original post:

The experts don’t seem to consider a major alternative: we could encourage teenagers to take sex and child-bearing seriously. Our culture actively promotes sex as a recreational activity. We come up with more aggressive and intrusive forms of contraception, because we can’t bring ourselves to tell teenagers that they should take sex seriously.

We seem to be unwilling to face the fact that contraception itself contributes to the problem of not taking sex seriously. Contraception allows people to get involved in relationships that can’t possibly sustain a pregnancy. We then call the resulting pregnancy “unintended,” a mechanical problem requiring a technical solution. After all, we are not supposed to be “judgmental” or “moralistic” about sex.

But there really is something wrong with purely recreational sex with someone that would be a disaster to be a parent with. We are using the other person as an object that gives us pleasure. We are not seeing our sex partner as the potential parent of our child, which they are, even if we don’t “intend” it. We are not giving ourselves completely to the other person. We are holding ourselves back, even as we expect sexual satisfaction from them. We have created a culture of “use and be used,” instead of “love and be loved.” The fact that the other person agrees to be used doesn’t make it ok.

Of course, the other fun thing at townhall is reading the comments, of let us say, varying quality.

Now You Tell Us....

The advocates of contraception have finally admitted in public what some of us have known for a while: The Pill doesn't work very well. James Trussell of Princeton is one of the leading experts on failure rates of various forms of contraception. Speaking at a conference in the UK, he said:

One in 12 women taking the Pill get pregnant each year because they miss so many tablets, Prof James Trussell, of Princeton University in America warned. ...

Half of all pregnancies in America are unintended and half of those happen because contraception failed or was not taken properly, the rest were not using any contraception.

He also admitted:

Increasing access to emergency contraception - the “morning after” pill - would also not have a significant effect on rates of unwanted pregnancy and abortions, he will tell the British Pregnancy Advisory Service conference in London today.

What is their proposed solution? Longer acting hormonal contraceptives, like injectables, and IUD's:

Speakers at the conference on the future of abortion will say that women should use longer-lasting methods such as hormonal implants or intrauterine devices (IUDs) that can be “fitted and forgotten”, but later removed if a woman wants a baby.

As it happens, I was just at a conference in which I showed the participants the failure rates of the Pill, broken down by demographic groups. It turns out that poor, cohabiting teenagers have a failure rate of almost 50%: 48.4% to be exact. That means, out of 100 girls with income under twice the poverty line, and who are under the age of 20 and living with their boyfriends, 48 of them will have a pregnancy within 12 months. Usually, people gasp when I show that chart. (Last year I did an article on the subject. The lefty netroots went nuts.) But a little thought will tell you why the failure rates are so high: the women aren't using their contraception correctly. James Trussel confirms this point:

He said studies have shown women miss three times as many pills as they say they do. Computerised pill packs have revealed that where as about half of women say they did not miss any pills, less than a third actually did. And where as between 10 per cent and 14 per cent admitted missing more than three pills in a month, actually between 30 per cent and 50 per cent missed that many.

The age-related failure rates suggest that the younger women are more likely to miss pills than older women. Do we really think we can come up with an educational program that will make poor cohabiting teenagers behave like married, middle-class, middle-aged women? I don't think so.
Evidently, neither does Dr. Trussell, because his solution is the long-acting contraception methods that you can just put in and forget.
But there is one other solution: unmarried women, especially teenagers, could have less sex. The failure rates for single women and married women are pretty similar, about 13% for poor women and 8% for the higher-income women.
If these girls really want to avoid pregnancy, they should kick their boyfriends out of the house. I wonder why no one from the British Pregnancy Advisory Service suggests that....

Hat tip to Ruben Obregon!

South Carolina Parents Involved in Education

I am just leaving a delightful conference for abstinence educators in South Carolina. South Carolina Parents Involved in Education puts on a week-long conference for high school and middle school educators to become better informed about abstinence education. I spoke, as did Dr. Miriam Grossman, author of Unprotected: How Political Correctness Endangers Students.

As luck would have it, when I opened my in-box, I found an e-mail directing my attention to this article by Ryan Anderson on Planned Parenthood's assault on abstinence education. I'll have more to say about the conference, and Ryan's post, later.

More on AIDS in Africa

This article in Zenit interviews Matthew Hanley, long-time technical expert on AIDS/HIV for the Catholic Relief Service. He is also author of a new book on AIDS in Africa, Avoiding Risk, Affirming Life: Science, Love, and AIDS. His conclusions have significant overlap with those of Helen Epstein, whose book I reviewed earlier. She argued that a reduction in the number of sexual partners, not an increase in the use of condoms, accounts for the most significant drops in new HIV infection rates. According to Matthew Hanley:

Actual changes in patterns of sexual behavior have led to the most significant reductions in HIV prevalence. Take the well-known case of Uganda, where the prevalence rate dropped from 15% in 1991 to a little over 5% in 2001. Behavior change was so thorough in Uganda that by the mid-1990s, 95% of adults in that country said they had only one partner or none at all. But it is not only Uganda.

The most important factor in recent HIV declines observed in several other countries, such as Kenya, Zimbabwe and Haiti has been an increase in fidelity or "partner reduction." This should not be altogether surprising, considering that in a large swath of southern Africa, where over half of new infections globally come from, the AIDS epidemic is being driven by the dynamics of multiple and often concurrent sexual partnerships.

In other words, changing behavior is more important than reducing the risk associated with a given set of behavior.
Hanley also talks about the uniquely Catholic aspects to his work. Not only is the Church trying to prevent disease, she is also trying to promote a healthy way of life, that integrates love and sexual activity within the context of married life.

We try to articulate what the Church actually proposes, abstinence and fidelity, in a positive manner. I have found in my trips to Africa that there is a real thirst for something different, something hopeful. We all know that people yearn for more than the satisfaction of their appetites. In other words, they yearn for love, for respect and for meaning in life. In his first encyclical, "Deus Caritas Est," Benedict XVI reminded us of long-standing Christian tradition, namely that human beings are a "union of body and soul," that love is characterized by exclusivity, or fidelity, and that love contains a quality of permanence over time.

When we conducted training recently with five dioceses in Ethiopia, one of the participants, a wife and a mother, spoke for the group by saying how much she appreciated the emphasis on fidelity and related human values such as respect and communication. She was puzzled as to why such basic themes are not more routinely promoted in the context of HIV prevention, adding: "Why hasn't anyone explained it like this before?"

So we try to address the whole human person, their deeper aspirations, and in proposing love, affirm basic Christian sexual ethics. It is on this level that the Church then encounters the wider culture, which as Pope John Paul II suggested in "Familiaris Consortio," often holds "fundamentally irreconcilable views of the human person and of human sexuality," leading many to aggressively reject these first principles.

Money quote from Matthew Hanley:

Perhaps one of the most helpful means that I have seen of expressing the moral significance of the issues involved comes from the Kenyan bishops. In their pastoral letter on AIDS, they hit upon the crux of the matter: The Church proposes the same sexual morality even "when and where AIDS poses no danger." The central issue with respect to the Church's consistent teaching on sexual matters is thus not the risk of HIV, but the lack of chastity, and "this is not easy for 'the world' to grasp.

What a concept.
I look forward to seeing his book.

Comprehensive Abstinence Education

That's my latest article in The National Catholic Register.

The genius of the Singles for Christ program is that the young people are brought up within a social network of shared expectations. Most of the Singles for Christ were probably Kids for Christ or Youth for Christ. They probably have married parents who are Couples for Christ or widowed grandmothers who are Handmaidens for Christ. When they were teenagers, probably very few went home to empty houses, turned on a TV porn channel, and had unsupervised afternoons after school.

This abstinence program is more than a classroom experience. This is a full way of life that provides young people with an appealing future as part of a married couple.

The lessons are embedded in a community of supportive adults, who expect certain behavior and model that behavior. The adults prepare the young to participate in the adult life of the community, on the community’s terms.

Read it all here.