April 19, 2007--Just Say Yes
A lot is going on in America and the world right now which means that some things are being overlooked. Abstinence for example.
When I was growing up pretty much everyone practiced it. Not so much because we believed it was the moral and ethical thing to do but rather, though we tried hard, because we couldn’t “get” any. And thus there was no need for a federal abstinence program.
But things have changed since those frustrating times; and in 1996, when Congress overhauled the welfare system, money was slipped into the legislation for abstinence education. President Clinton signed the bill. I recall that it was thought that if we could just get kids to say no to sex (since saying no to drugs was working so well) there would be (1) fewer children on welfare and (2) no need for abortions.
Though Congress has been criticized for not providing adequate oversight for its appropriations for things such as the war in Iraq, in the case of the abstinence program they called for an evaluation of how well it was working. The results of that study by the Mathematica Policy Research group have just been released. And the situation is not looking good. (See linked NY Times article.)
For example, students who participated in the program were just as likely to have sex as those who did not. That sort of jumps out. And, the study found, they had just as many sex partners and began having pre-marital sex at exactly the same age as those kids who did not take the abstinence classes.
Not to be deterred by these disappointing findings, officials of the Bush administration, who we assume are more passionate about this program than Bill Clinton must have been, claim that the treatment was too limited—how can one expect students to abstain from sex by running them through just a few sessions. To quote Harry Wilson, associate commissioner of the federal Family and Youth Services Bureau, “This report confirms that these interventions are not like vaccinations. You can’t expect one dose in middle school, or a small dose, to be protective all throughout the youth’s high school career.”
You may wonder how much taxpayer money has been squandered on these efforts—about $176 million per year. Thus, I assume that Mr. Wilson will ask Congress to increase that appropriation so he can run these classes right through high school. And perhaps he’ll be calling for a new program to see if scientists can come up with an abstinence vaccine.
One more thing—the Mathematica report found that all who were studied, both the treated and untreated, began to have sex at 14.9 years of age. How envious that made me feel because in my old neighborhood the only one having sex that young, actually at any time before twenty-one, was Heshy.
When I was growing up pretty much everyone practiced it. Not so much because we believed it was the moral and ethical thing to do but rather, though we tried hard, because we couldn’t “get” any. And thus there was no need for a federal abstinence program.
But things have changed since those frustrating times; and in 1996, when Congress overhauled the welfare system, money was slipped into the legislation for abstinence education. President Clinton signed the bill. I recall that it was thought that if we could just get kids to say no to sex (since saying no to drugs was working so well) there would be (1) fewer children on welfare and (2) no need for abortions.
Though Congress has been criticized for not providing adequate oversight for its appropriations for things such as the war in Iraq, in the case of the abstinence program they called for an evaluation of how well it was working. The results of that study by the Mathematica Policy Research group have just been released. And the situation is not looking good. (See linked NY Times article.)
For example, students who participated in the program were just as likely to have sex as those who did not. That sort of jumps out. And, the study found, they had just as many sex partners and began having pre-marital sex at exactly the same age as those kids who did not take the abstinence classes.
Not to be deterred by these disappointing findings, officials of the Bush administration, who we assume are more passionate about this program than Bill Clinton must have been, claim that the treatment was too limited—how can one expect students to abstain from sex by running them through just a few sessions. To quote Harry Wilson, associate commissioner of the federal Family and Youth Services Bureau, “This report confirms that these interventions are not like vaccinations. You can’t expect one dose in middle school, or a small dose, to be protective all throughout the youth’s high school career.”
You may wonder how much taxpayer money has been squandered on these efforts—about $176 million per year. Thus, I assume that Mr. Wilson will ask Congress to increase that appropriation so he can run these classes right through high school. And perhaps he’ll be calling for a new program to see if scientists can come up with an abstinence vaccine.
One more thing—the Mathematica report found that all who were studied, both the treated and untreated, began to have sex at 14.9 years of age. How envious that made me feel because in my old neighborhood the only one having sex that young, actually at any time before twenty-one, was Heshy.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
12:40 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home