Tag Archives: Sex Education

Commentary

How more compassion and less moral judgments increases teen pregnancy

17 Comments

From the centrist City Journal. (H/T Ruth Blog)

Excerpt:

Within my lifetime, single parenthood has been transformed from shame to saintliness. In our society, perversely, we celebrate the unwed mother as a heroic figure, like a fireman or a police officer. During the last presidential election, much was made of Obama’s mother, who was a single parent. Movie stars and pop singers flaunt their daddy-less babies like fishing trophies.

None of this is lost on my students. In today’s urban high school, there is no shame or social ostracism when girls become pregnant. Other girls in school want to pat their stomachs. Their friends throw baby showers at which meager little gifts are given. After delivery, the girls return to school with baby pictures on their cell phones or slipped into their binders, which they eagerly share with me. Often they sit together in my classes, sharing insights into parenting, discussing the taste of Pedialite or the exhaustion that goes with the job. On my way home at night, I often see my students in the projects that surround our school, pushing their strollers or hanging out on their stoops instead of doing their homework.

Connecticut is among the most generous of the states to out-of-wedlock mothers. Teenage girls like Nicole qualify for a vast array of welfare benefits from the state and federal governments: medical coverage when they become pregnant (called “Healthy Start”); later, medical insurance for the family (“Husky”); child care (“Care 4 Kids”); Section 8 housing subsidies; the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; cash assistance. If you need to get to an appointment, state-sponsored dial-a-ride is available. If that appointment is college-related, no sweat: education grants for single mothers are available, too. Nicole didn’t have to worry about finishing the school year; the state sent a $35-an-hour tutor directly to her home halfway into her final trimester and for six weeks after the baby arrived.

In theory, this provision of services is humane and defensible, an essential safety net for the most vulnerable—children who have children. What it amounts to in practice is a monolithic public endorsement of single motherhood—one that has turned our urban high schools into puppy mills. The safety net has become a hammock.

The article contains a case study, so you really get the feel for what’s behind the statistics.

Remember that fatherlessness is not good for children – so we should not be encouraging fatherlessness.

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News

Researchers link rise in some cancers to increased sexual activity

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From USA Today. (H/T Ruth Blog)

Excerpt:

Although the link between HPV and these types of cancers is indisputable, the association with oral sex is strong but a little more speculative, experts say.

A 2007 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that younger people with head and neck cancers who tested positive for oral HPV infection were more likely to have had multiple vaginal and oral sex partners in their lifetime.

In the study, having six or more oral sex partners over a lifetime was associated with a 3.4 times higher risk for oropharyngeal cancer — cancers of the base of the tongue, back of the throat or tonsils. Having 26 or more vaginal-sex partners tripled the risk.

And the association increased as the number of partners — in either category — increased.

The researchers also reported that cancers of the tonsil and base of the tongue have been increasing every year since 1973, and wrote that “widespread oral sex practices among adolescents may be a contributing factor in this increase.”

The researchers concluded that in their study, oral sex was “strongly associated” with oropharyngeal cancer, but noted that they could not “rule out transmission through direct mouth-to-mouth contact” such as French kissing.

In 90% of cases of HPV infection in the body, the immune system clears HPV naturally within two years, according to federal health agencies, but in some cases, certain types of HPV can lead to cervical cancer or less common malignancies, such as oropharyngeal cancer. A 2010 Swedish study, in fact, suggested that the rise in oropharyngeal squamous cell cancer in a number of countries “is caused by a slow epidemic of HPV infection-induced (cancers).”

HPV tends to be site specific, explained Dr. Amesh A. Adalja, an adjunct instructor in the division of infectious diseases at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. In other words, it tends to stay wherever it first enters the body, be it the vagina (which in some cases could lead to cervical cancer), or the mouth and throat.

Now here is the scary part:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that, in 2002, some 90% of males and 88% of females aged 25 to 44 reported ever having oral sex with a partner of the opposite sex.

Comparable figures from 1992 showed that about three-quarters of men aged 20 to 39 and closer to 70% of women aged 18 to 59 having ever given or received oral sex.

And don’t forget that breast cancer has been linked to having abortions by several independent studies.

Commentary

What is the real issue in the push for legalized abortion?

3 Comments

I think the main cause of the desire for legalized abortion, is that women and men do not want to take responsibility for their actions.

The sexual act always has a chance of making a baby. If people who are having sex are not ready to take care of a baby, without the government’s help, then they should not have sex. We should not take chances with other people’s lives just so we can do risky things that make us feel good. The needs of grown-ups to feel good does not trump the right to life of another (unborn) human being. We have to sometimes give up things that make us feel good in order to avoid harming others.

I think the reason why people push abortion is because they want to believe that pre-marital recreational sex is normal. The people who push these policies are often those who had sex themselves before they were married, perhaps because it was fun (men) or perhaps because they wanted attention from the opposite sex (women). They wanted the recreational sex to feel good, but didn’t want to be saddled with the consequences of their desire for happiness.

I think the solution is to replace recreational pre-marital sex with chastity, courting and marriage. Men need to learn to control their desires, and make good decisions to prepare for being a husband and father, and get married, before they have sex. Women need to learn to do without male attention, to prepare themselves for having a husband and children, and to have sex only after they are married. Pre-marital sex isn’t an appropriate way for a woman to get attention from a man. There are other ways. And we should be training men to respond to those other ways. We should also be encouraging fathers to stay married and model love for their children by loving their wives.

We should not have any laws or policies that discourage men from preparing for their role of protector/provider/moral-and-spiritual-leader in a marriage. Sex education should not be subsidized or promoted by government because it makes children learn about sex outside of the context of marriage. And we should likewise not have any laws or policies that discourage women from preparing for marriage, by making husbands seem unnecessary to having and raising children. For example, we should end welfare payments for single mothers to make it clear that men are needed to provide for children, and that men should be selected by women for that role.

Children need a stable relationship with their married biological mother and father. So government has to promote marriage. Government may have to give up promoting third-wave feminism so that we can strengthen marriage, since third-wave feminism is opposed to marriage. We may need to to roll-back to first-wave (equal opportunity) feminism and give up the misguided quest to equate men with women in every area of life.

And we shouldn’t be pushing sex education as a way of removing the moral prohibitions on pre-marital sex. Those prohibitions were there for a reason and people who have pre-marital sex SHOULD feel bad. The solution is NOT to tell everyone that there is nothing wrong with it just because the people who do it want to feel better about themselves by making everyone agree with them. I think the left uses the public schools to beat down moral standards so that they will feel better about their own immorality. But immorality is harmful – and it’s better for young people to abide by traditional moral rules and avoid harming themselves and others than for grown-ups to avoid feeling bad for breaking those rules. Sorry grown-ups, but maybe it feels bad because it is bad – and stop trying to tell everyone that what you did was fine. It wasn’t fine. It was wrong.

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