sky high teen pregnancyb

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On Sat, 8 Jul 2007, Ray Fischer wrote:

osprey wrote:
John Mayson wrote:
On Thu, 6 Jul 2007, Ray Fischer wrote:

Abstinence education, included with all other birth control methods, is
worthwhile.

It is CRAP. It doesn't work. Studies have shown as much.

Care to cite these "studies"? There's nothing wrong with teaching
abstinance along with other birth control means.

I totally agree.

With people like Fisher and IAAH, it's got to be just their way
only..no compramising.

You spend YOUR money promoting your religion.

abstinance != religion

- --
John Mayson
Austin, Texas, USA

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In article om,
John Mayson wrote:

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On Sun, 8 Jul 2007, james g. keegan jr. wrote:

In article
,
John Mayson wrote:
Abstinence education, included with all other birth control methods, is
worthwhile.

It is CRAP. It doesn't work. Studies have shown as much.

Care to cite these "studies"? There's nothing wrong with teaching
abstinance along with other birth control means.

even the bush administration's own studies, as well as several
others, demonstrated that teaching abstinence didn't result in fewer
pregnancies.

Okay. Provide links to this. I can claim anything under the sun too.
Doesn't make it true.

there were a half dozen or more posts here referencing it. you can
get the basic idea here

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/053107HA.shtml

of course there is far more when you consider that in the other
nations where bush pushed for abstinence only the hiv numbers grew as
did teen pregnancies.

the conclusion is obvious; what should be taught is something that
works .... assuming that a reduction in unwanted pregnancies is
really what is wanted.

Different things work for different kids. Some will abstain. Some won't.
It's immoral to teach everything BUT abstinance or abstinance and nothing
else.

it's more immoral, as well as dangerous, to waste time and money
teaching something which has demonstrated that it doesn't work just
to support a minority religious view.

i have no problem with teachers stating the obvious, but to waste any
time on it is silly.


of course, reducing pregnancies isn't a goal of the right.
controlling behavior is.

I wouldn't know.

why not? isn't it obvious?

--
get real. like jesus would ever own a gun or vote republican.

In article om,
John Mayson wrote:

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On Sun, 8 Jul 2007, james g. keegan jr. wrote:

In article
,
John Mayson wrote:
Abstinence education, included with all other birth control methods, is
worthwhile.

It is CRAP. It doesn't work. Studies have shown as much.

Care to cite these "studies"? There's nothing wrong with teaching
abstinance along with other birth control means.

even the bush administration's own studies, as well as several
others, demonstrated that teaching abstinence didn't result in fewer
pregnancies.

Okay. Provide links to this.

john, i responded to this in another post but I think the information
below is everything you want.

Message-ID:
8325f7360706260939v400ffaefsa770b92829142cbe@mail .gmail.com
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 22:09:58 +0530
From: "Sweety Prem Kumar R"
To:
Subject: Abstinence & Prevention
MIME-Version: 1.0
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boundary="----=_Part_21701_20059805.1182875998985"

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Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline

Message from

*Ray Martin, Executive Director*

*Christian Connections for International Health*

Dr. Kumar,

This is the second time I tried to send the message and as you can
see by the email I am forwarding, it did not go through. I will
copy the text below. I will also send it separately as an
attachment in hope of preserving the formatting so you can send
easily copy it to send out.


*Friends on AIDS-Beyond-Borders listserv,*

* *

*At the request of Dr. R.S. Prem Kumar, I am forwarding this message
that was circulated on our ABCplus listserv. *

**

Although policies and regulations governing U.S. Government support
for sex education and abstinence promotion overseas are not the same
as those for domestic programs, we offer in this message dueling
studies on the domestic debate between what is commonly referred to
as "comprehensive sex education" and "abstinence-only" education.
Interestingly, although the two studies may seem to arrive at some
quite divergent conclusions, both were funded by the U.S. Department
of Health and Human Welfare.



The key finding of the April study of four abstinence education
programs (item II below) is "that the programs had no effect on the
sexual abstinence of youth." Now, this new study (item I below)
charges that programs that endorse condom use are marred by
imbalance and inaccuracies, and were only marginally successful in
persuading young people to use condoms or, better yet, to delay
having sex.



I. The first item below is an article on a just published study
entitled *Review of Comprehensive Sex Education Curricula.* The
article is online at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...07/06/20/AR200
7062002235.htmland the HHS report is accessible at
http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/fysb.../06122007-1534
24.PDF



II. The second item below, reported in an April 18, 2007, ABCplus
listserv message and described in this article online at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...07/04/13/AR200
7041301003.html, reports on a study entitled *Impacts of Four Title
V, Section 510 Abstinence Education Programs*. It can be downloaded
at http://www.mathematica.org/publicati...abstinence.pdf





I. HHS Counters With Its Own Sex-Ed Critique


By Christopher Lee, Washington Post Staff Writer, Thursday, June 21,
2007; A21


Liberal critics periodically complain that federally funded
"abstinence only" sex-education materials are full of false or
misleading statements about the effectiveness of condoms and other
issues. Now the Bush administration is firing back, charging that
programs that endorse condom use also are marred by imbalance and
inaccuracies.


The latest round in the sex-ed culture war comes in a 40-page report
by the Department of Health and Human Services that critiqued
"comprehensive sex-education curricula" -- materials that teach
about both abstinence and the use of condoms and other protective
methods. The analysis -- requested two years ago by Sen. Tom Coburn
(Okla.) and former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.), both conservative
Republicans -- concluded that nine widely used curricula contained
misleading statements about condom failure, focused too little on
abstinence and were only marginally successful in persuading young
people to use condoms or, better yet, to delay having sex.


"This study shows that very little of the message is around
abstinence," said Harry Wilson, an associate commissioner in HHS's
Administration on Children, Youth and Families. "When it comes to
what they actually do in their curricula, this shows that it is kind
of given the short end of the stick."


One curriculum, Safer Choices Level 1, mentioned condoms 383 times
and abstinence only five, the report said. But Douglas Kirby, a
senior research scientist at ETR Associates, the California-based
nonprofit organization that developed the curriculum, said the
materials make the same point with different language, using phrases
such as "choosing not to have sex" or "saying no to sex."


"It's all about abstinence; it's just different words," Kirby said.
"There's twice as much material in this curriculum on abstinence
than on condoms and contraception."


HHS spends about $176 million a year on abstinence education, said
Wilson, who did not know the comparable figure for comprehensive sex
education. The new study, which cost $77,000, was done by the
nonprofit Sagamore Institute for Policy Research in Indianapolis and
the Medical Institute for Sexual Health, an Austin-based nonprofit
group that advocates that adolescents and adults remain abstinent
"until committing to a life-long mutually monogamous relationship
such as marriage."


It is the latest burst in a rhetorical exchange that has been raging
for years. In 2004, Henry A. Waxman (D), a liberal California
congressman, issued an analysis that found that 11 of 13
abstinence-only curricula contained medically inaccurate or
misleading information, including assertions that touching a
person's genitals can result in pregnancy and that condoms fail to
prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in
heterosexual intercourse.


The HHS report said that of the nine curricula it reviewed, six had
medically inaccurate statements, most commonly that the spermicide
nonoxynol-9 reduced the risk of contracting HIV and other sexually
transmitted diseases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
has said that it does not protect against such infections.


The HHS report said that eight of the curricula contained no
inaccuracies about statistics related to condom effectiveness, but
that the numbers sometimes lacked context. For example, programs
that say latex condoms prevent pregnancy 97 percent of the time when
used correctly (the figure actually is 98 percent, experts said)
should also note that studies show that the probability of pregnancy
during the first year of "typical" use is 15 percent. Not everyone
uses condoms properly every time.


The report also objected to statements such as, "Condoms made of
latex provide good protection from HIV when used correctly and
consistently during vaginal, anal or oral sex." It said such
statements lacked "explicit details" about condom failure rates.


James Trussell, a demographer at Princeton University whose research
on condom failures was cited frequently in the HHS report, said the
authors got the data right but overstated the importance of the
errors.


"These examples of medical inaccuracies pale in comparison to those
in abstinence-only curricula," he said in an e-mail. "Many errors
cited in the Waxman report are egregious, whereas many errors cited
in the [HHS] report are not."





II. Study Casts Doubt on Abstinence-Only Programs



By Laura Sessions Stepp, Washington Post Staff Writer, Saturday,
April 14, 2007; A02


A long-awaited national study has concluded that abstinence-only sex
education, a cornerstone of the Bush administration's social agenda,
does not keep teenagers from having sex. Neither does it increase or
decrease the likelihood that if they do have sex, they will use a
condom.


Authorized by Congress in 1997, the study followed 2000 children
from elementary or middle school into high school. The children
lived in four communities -- two urban, two rural. All of the
children received the family life services available in their
community, in addition, slightly more than half of them also
received abstinence-only education.


By the end of the study, when the average child was just shy of 17,
half of both groups had remained abstinent. The sexually active
teenagers had sex the first time at about age 15. Less than a
quarter of them, in both groups, reported using a condom every time
they had sex. More than a third of both groups had two or more
partners.


"There's not a lot of good news here for people who pin their hopes
on abstinence-only education," said Sarah Brown, executive director
of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, a privately
funded organization that monitors sex education programs. "This is
the first study with a solid, experimental design, the first with
adequate numbers and long-term follow-up, the first to measure
behavior and not just intent. On every measure, the effectiveness of
the programs was flat."


The report's release comes as questions are being raised in several
quarters about abstinence programs. A bill introduced in Congress,
sponsored by both Republican and Democratic members, would allocate
money for sex education that teaches abstinence and contraception.
In addition, eight states that used to receive funding for
abstinence programs have decided to stop doing so, two of them very
recently. Federal abstinence funds come up for congressional renewal
this summer under the Title V grant.


The federal government spends $176 million a year on abstinence-only
education, and millions more are spent every year in state and local
matching grants. Harry Wilson, a top official in the Department of
Health and Human Services, said yesterday that the administration
has no intention of changing funding priorities in light of the
results.


"This study isn't rigorous enough to show whether or not
[abstinence-only] education works," Wilson said. Some federal money,
in addition to state and local dollars, supports comprehensive sex
education, he said. What is spent on abstinence "is not that much
money when it comes to offering an alternative to the other
message." He said modifications in the program are already being
considered, including a focus on low-income neighborhoods and
extending instruction into high school.


The study did not address the impact of a student's family income on
the effectiveness of abstinence-only programs.


The results came as a bit of surprise even to Christopher Trenholm,
who supervised the project at Mathematica Policy Research Inc. An
early analysis by his organization showed some attitude shifts
toward delaying sex among students in the abstinence programs, but
those differences disappeared as students got older. One thing they
also learned, Trenholm said, was that kids receiving abstinence
instruction did not use condoms less often than other kids, a
possibility that critics occasionally raise. They also showed
slightly better knowledge about the prevention of sexually
transmitted disease.


Kids in both groups were knowledgeable about the risks of having sex
without using a condom or other form of protection. Knowing that did
not mean they put on a condom every time, however. Condom use was
not high in either group; of those who had sex, almost half said
they used condoms only "sometimes" or "never." Brown said
Mathematica's results underscore what other, smaller studies have
shown: "The most effective programs are those that say abstinence is
the best choice but birth control and protection are also worth
knowing about."


An official at the Sexuality Information and Education Council of
the United States agreed. "Comprehensive education means teaching
about abstinence and a myriad of other topics," said spokeswoman
Martha Kempner. Among them, she said: "contraception, critical
thinking, one's own values and the values of your family and your
religious community.


"Abstinence-only was an experiment and it failed."

--
get real. like jesus would ever own a gun or vote republican.

John Mayson wrote:
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On Sat, 8 Jul 2007, Ray Fischer wrote:

osprey wrote:
John Mayson wrote:
On Thu, 6 Jul 2007, Ray Fischer wrote:

Abstinence education, included with all other birth control methods, is
worthwhile.

It is CRAP. It doesn't work. Studies have shown as much.

Care to cite these "studies"? There's nothing wrong with teaching
abstinance along with other birth control means.

I totally agree.

With people like Fisher and IAAH, it's got to be just their way
only..no compramising.

You spend YOUR money promoting your religion.

abstinance != religion

Yes, it does, when it's a religious agenda and not supported by
evidence.

--
Ray Fischer

John Mayson wrote:
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On Sat, 8 Jul 2007, Ray Fischer wrote:

John Mayson wrote:
Ray Fischer wrote:

Abstinence education, included with all other birth control methods, is
worthwhile.

It is CRAP. It doesn't work. Studies have shown as much.

Care to cite these "studies"? There's nothing wrong with teaching
abstinance along with other birth control means.

Sinxe when are the schools supposed to be teaching your religion or
your morality? I thought that you right wingers didn't like schools
teaching morality. Or is it that you only want YOUR "morality"
taught?

Who mentioned religion? I didn't. Abstinance is not the same was
religion.

Pull the other one.

What I want is for young people to have all the information we can give
them about sexuality and censor nothing.

That is contrary to abstinence only education.

You want to censor abstinance
education because it doesn't fit into YOUR morality.

No, because it doesn't work.

--
Ray Fischer