Tag Archives: Condoms

News

What works to halt the spread of AIDS? Morality or condoms?

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New Map of Africa
New Map of Africa

From MercatorNet.

Excerpt:

Earlier this year, the journal PLoS Medicine published a stunning report about the prevalence of AIDS in Zimbabwe. Over the ten years to 2007 HIV prevalence was halved. This decline is almost unique in sub-Saharan Africa.

Aha! you might say. Despite the disastrous state of its economy, Zimbabwe has been distributing condoms by the millions to bring down adult prevalence from 27 percent to 16 percent. But you would be quite wrong. It is not condoms which are saving the lives of thousands of Zimbabweans, say researchers, but changes in behaviour, “mainly reductions in extramarital, commercial, and casual sexual relations”.

In other words, it looks like abstinence and fidelity are the secret to turning around the devastating AIDS epidemic which has killed 30 million people and infected 33 million and orphaned 16 million children.

Not condoms.

This report supports the thesis of the authors of the fascinating book Affirming Love, Avoiding AIDS, Matthew Hanley and Jokin de Irala.

[…]Hanley and de Irala show that “primary behaviour change” is the best weapon for fighting AIDS, not “harm reduction”. In fact, the rapid spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, despite a thorough understanding of how it spreads and billions spent on risk reduction, is “one of the greatest failures in the history of public health”. The South African strategy assumed, for instance, that the spread of AIDS has little to do with sexual responsibility. Authorities there promoted condoms with a “have fun but play safely” campaign. The results have been disastrous. About 18 percent of men and women between 18 and 49 live with HIV/AIDS.

The AIDS bureaucracy is committed to technical fixes despite lip service to abstinence and fidelity. Condoms, voluntary counselling and testing and treatment of other sexually transmitted diseases are their strategies. All of these are effective to some degree, but they ignore mounting evidence that HIV transmission rates remain high despite widespread distribution of condoms. In Botswana, the authors point out, condom sales increased from 1 million in 1993 to 3 million in 2001, while HIV prevalence rose from 27 to 45 percent among pregnant urban women. Between 1990 and 2002 life expectancy fell by 30 years in Botswana, a decline “unprecedented in the history of the human race”.

Why don’t condoms work? It’s not a question of permeability or breakage, but of how they are used. For one thing, only consistent condom use is effective in warding off AIDS. Yet it appears that most men use condoms very irregularly. And the evidence is mounting that condoms actually promote risky sexual behaviour because users feel that they are protected.

The engine of the epidemic is multiple sex partners, a growing number of AIDS researchers believe. When people have stopped engaging in casual sex and participating in a web of sex relationships, as has happened in Uganda and Zimbabwe, AIDS rates have fallen dramatically.

Here’s the abstract from the paper:

There is growing recognition that primary prevention, including behavior change, must be central in the fight against HIV/AIDS. The earlier successes in Thailand and Uganda may not be fully relevant to the severely affected countries of southern Africa.

We conducted an extensive multi-disciplinary synthesis of the available data on the causes of the remarkable HIV decline that has occurred in Zimbabwe (29% estimated adult prevalence in 1997 to 16% in 2007), in the context of severe social, political, and economic disruption.

The behavioral changes associated with HIV reduction—mainly reductions in extramarital, commercial, and casual sexual relations, and associated reductions in partner concurrency—appear to have been stimulated primarily by increased awareness of AIDS deaths and secondarily by the country’s economic deterioration. These changes were probably aided by prevention programs utilizing both mass media and church-based, workplace-based, and other inter-personal communication activities.

Focusing on partner reduction, in addition to promoting condom use for casual sex and other evidence-based approaches, is crucial for developing more effective prevention programs, especially in regions with generalized HIV epidemics.

Government programs that basically try to take promiscuity as a given and then reshuffle wealth around to make the promiscuous avoid the consequences of their own choices. Why is that? Well, government bureaucrats would be out of a job if people behaved responsibly – they have every incentive NOT to solve social problems. The bigger the social problems, the more money they can collect in taxes. The more money they collect in taxes, the more they can play Robin Hood and get accolades from the public for their generosity. That is the real reason that people on the left, who love to feel as though they are solving problems for people by shuffling money around, oppose personal responsibility.

News

Does sex education reduce teen pregnancies and sexually-transmitted infections?

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The American Thinker evaluates Planned Parenthood’s sex education strategy for reducing teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections.

Excerpt:

Planned Parenthood’s anointed sex missionaries received their first federal funding in the Lyndon Johnson administration. The sort of “sex education” now pushed in Santa Fe and elsewhere started in 1968 when the National Education Association Journal called for “sex education as an integral part of school curriculum beginning in early grades.”[3] Planned Parenthood, the NEA, and herds of shrill progressives were following a behavioral pattern characteristic of the 1960s left.

An early example of the pattern emerged in the reactions to Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring scare-book, which got DDT banned and still enables the malaria deaths of about 3,000 children a day. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 Population Bomb — turned dud — warned of mass starvations unless humanity curbs its reproductive enthusiasm. Then also in 1968, the NEA Journal demanded solutions to imagined problems.

Imagined, because calls for sex education were based on “problems” that lived only in the minds of anointed ones seeking to spread agendas. “Contraception education” would allegedly reduce unwanted pregnancies and illegitimate births.[4] A “crash educational program”[5] would arrest out-of-control venereal disease, while general sex education would address “the emotionally disastrous results of irresponsible sexual behavior.”[6] The claims shared a common thread: fictitious bases.

Not only were there no disease and illegitimacy crises, but indicators were solidly improving at the time of the alarmists’ claims. As Sowell documents in The Vision of the Anointed,[7] teenage pregnancies and venereal disease declined during the 1950s and 1960s. Yet over skeptics’ protests that sex education would increase sexual behavior, Planned Parenthood and public schools forged ahead to curtail behaviors that were already fading. Sex-ed was off and running.

And results followed.

During the 1970s, pregnancies among fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds jumped 41 percent.[8] Between 1970 and 1984, abortions among unwed fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds more than doubled and birth rates jumped 29 percent.[9] By 1976, five years of data showed unmarried girls fifteen to nineteen having sex at increasing rates.[10] And not only did venereal disease not subside, but teen gonorrhea rates tripled between 1956 and 1975.[11]

In the 1950s, 13 percent of teen girls had been sexually active. By the late 90s, the figure had tripled. Premarital intercourse, approved by less than a third of women in the 1950s, was acceptable to 91 percent by the late 80s. By 2005, over two-thirds of Blacks and half of Latino high-schoolers were having intercourse, while over half of all teens fifteen to nineteen were performing oral sex. By 2006, babies born to unmarried women accounted for 37 percent of all births, [12] 70 percent among Blacks. The Black illegitimacy rate reflected a 218 percent explosion over forty-five years.

Such realities have drawn dismissive responses from sex-ed advocates. Incredibly, the horrific trends of the 1970s and 1980s were offered as reason for more sex education.[13] Yet amid cover-ups and excuses, the sex-ed crowd’s true motives were exposed in 1978, in of all places, Congress. One committee report noted that despite sex education’s stated objective of reducing teen pregnancies and sexually-transmitted disease, the real goal “of most sex educators appears to be encouragement of healthy attitudes about sex and sexuality.”

This is the same thing that happened in the UK – it’s not just here.

So there was no crisis for the pro sex-education to solve.

Sex education was always about indoctrinating children against the wisdom and morality of their parents. And they got their funding and their access to the public schools from the Democrat party. A vote for a Democrat politician is a vote for sex education. A vote for sex education is a vote for teen pregnancies, abortions, and sexually-transmitted diseases. And according to the research I posted about before, the premarital sex in and of itself is lousy preparation for a stable, fulfilling marriage. The left is ruining the lives of our children, and our children’s children by deliberately lying to them about right and wrong. There is also this new Oxford University Press book that links premarital sex and promiscuity with reduced mental health.

Why do they do this? They do this because they think that the best way to stop people from having feelings of shame and guilt is to break down the moral boundaries that specify what is right and wrong. That’s what’s behind this – normalizing risky, irresponsible behavior. And the way that the left deals with the skyrocketing numbers of teen pregnancies and sexually-transmitted infections is to double down with more sex education – and more government spending on social programs, followed by tax hikes to pay for all the lifestyle-equalizing. And then, of course, fewer men can afford to marry because of those tax rates, and fewer women can afford to stay home and raise their young children.

After all, there’s no social problem in the world that can’t be fixed by a little more government intervention and public school indoctrination. If worse comes to worse and the health care costs costs increase, we can just make health care “free” by nationalizing it to completely separate behaviors from consequences. That should get rid of the problem. And if all of these broken homes create children who commit criminal acts, we can always ban guns and legalize drugs. That should get rid of the problem.

That’s how the left thinks. Or rather – that’s how the left feels.

News

Public schools hand out condoms to 5-year olds without parental consent

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The story is here.(H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

An elementary school in Provincetown is constituting a controversial condom distribution policy…

The new policy, which the school board voted unanimously to pass, requires students in the elementary school and the high school to speak with a school nurse or trained counselor before receiving a condom.

This will allow students of all ages to learn information on proper use.

The policy also directs school leaders not to honor demands from parents who object to their kids receiving protection.The school feels that this would infringe on the kids’ right to inform parents.

“We’re talking about younger kids. They have questions they need answered on how to use them, when to use them,” School Superintendent Dr. Beth Singer said.

The video within the story is a MUST SEE. The superintendent explains why 5-year olds have a right to privacy, and that parents have no right to stop the schools from doing this.

Remember, parents are forced to pay for these schools – they have no choice. And if they have no choice to prefer an alternative to mandatory funding of public schools, then the public schools have no reason to care what parents want. They get paid anyway. Service/product providers only care what consumers want when consumers can walk away from the deal and go to a competitor. Public schools are a monopoly – they don’t care what parents think. They get paid anyway.

Watch this:

Parents are not trained professionals with 4-year degrees in “education”, you know. So just leave your children to the educational experts, will you please? Leave the education of your children to the “experts”. Just drop your money on table and walk away from your children. The Nanny State will take care of everything – just trust them.

What about Canada?

In liberal Quebec, the liberal Ministry of Education is appealing a judge’s decision to block them from indoctrinating children in all schools including private schools in religious pluralism – that all religions are equally sound – and moral relativism – that all moral points of view are equally valid. They want to teach this to children in all schools, public and private with no opt-out for taxpaying parents. Understand? You are paying for public schools and education bureaucrats to indoctrinate your children and your neighbor’s children with epistemic and moral relativism, not to mention religious pluralism.

I think the problem with people who vote for more funding for public schools is that no one ever looks into what these unionized educrats really believe and school administrators really believe.

And this is why money matters to a family. You need money to afford private school tuition or homeschooling. Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know. And the higher the tax rates, the more you pay, and the less freedom you have to fight the system.