http://sptimes.com/2004/12/12/Columns/F ... g_on.shtmlFact-free teaching on sexBy ROBYN E. BLUMNER, Times Perspective Columnist
Published December 12, 2004
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The 1938 government antimarijuana propaganda film Reefer Madness is still watched today for its campy excesses. Dr. Carroll, the moralizing high school principal, warns parents that marijuana is more dangerous than opium and heroin. Those who smoke the drug are depicted as instantly addicted and crazed.
We laugh at these scare tactics today. But the government has not ended its efforts to modify behavior by using campaigns of exaggerations and lies. A new congressional report has found that the nation's most popular government-funded abstinence-only sex education programs are peppered with inaccuracies that misinform young people about the risks of sex, contraceptives and abortion. It's Reefer Madness all over again. Or, as one research group called it, "Scared Chaste."
One aspect of President Bush's continuing efforts to direct our tax money to religiously affiliated groups is the push for a massive expansion of federal funding for abstinence-only sex education. During the 2005 fiscal year, the federal government will spend $170-million to support programs that preach that sex is to be reserved for marriage only, and a number of the recipients of those dollars will be faith-based. That's more than double what was spent in 2001.
But unlike Bush's energetic concern over educational accountability and standards reflected in No Child Left Behind, the curricula for abstinence-only sex education programs are not vetted for accuracy. (There was an attempt by Democratic lawmakers in 2002 to require medical accuracy as a condition of receiving money for these programs, but that effort was voted down by Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.)
So rather than getting the tools they need to make sensible choices about their health and bodies, young people are being told outrageous lies, such as how 5 to 10 percent of women who have abortions will become sterile (when there's no correlation between elective abortions and sterility) or how condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission 31 percent of the time (when a study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that consistent condom use resulted in a zero transmission rate.)
The congressional study, conducted by the Special Investigations Division of the Committee on Government Reform at the behest of Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., found "false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health" in more than 80 percent of the most popular abstinence-only curricula.
The result is not that young people are scared off sex until marriage. (Even most of those who take virginity pledges engage in premarital sex.) It's that they don't bother taking precautions against sexually transmitted diseases or pregnancy. They are led to believe that condoms are ineffective.
"We hear from kids all the time about the myths they've been fed," said Marilyn Anderson, director of education at Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida. "The whole idea is to scare kids and make them think they'll get HIV by having sex. But what's walking into our clinic says that kids are having sex, just without condoms."
Although the federal government has determinedly refused to study whether any correlation exists between teaching abstinence and actual abstinence, the social science that does exist demonstrates very little positive impact. The handful of states that have studied it found no long-term success in delaying sexual initiation. Instead, some state program evaluators said the programs' lack of information on pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases was leading to dangerous attitudes and behaviors.
Bush's push for abstinence-only education is a way to pander to his base. According to Adrienne Verrilli, director of communications at the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, the purveyors of these programs are often connected to the antiabortion movement.
It's no surprise, then, that the curricula have also been found to mix religion and science in ways to promote an antiabortion agenda. One course described a blastocyst as a "tiny baby" that "snuggles" into the uterus. Another called a 43-day-old fetus a "thinking person."
In Louisiana, a state-sponsored Web site tells young people that withholding sex until marriage makes one "really, truly, "cool' in God's eyes." And in Florida, the Pinellas Pregnancy Center received more than $300,000 in 2003 and about $200,000 in 2004 in taxpayer money to spread an abstinence-only message in public school health classrooms. They reach between 5,000 and 6,000 students a year this way, according to program coordinator Linda Daniels. The center describes itself as "a faith-based organization that offers a Christian response to the issue of abortion."
Insanity has been described as doing the same thing under the same conditions and expecting differing results. The government is once again squandering its money on falsehoods, wild exaggerations and scare tactics that have young people either snickering or ignoring the message. Now that's madness.
