Stop Teaching Only Abstinence!

Teaching children about the correct way of using birth control methods should not be an option offered in schools. That is a topic that should be taught out of the classroom, perhaps in a work shop, or by parents or peers. By teaching children these method, schools are encouraging teens to have sex. Teaching both could be the equivalent to saying, "Don't do meth kids...but if you do, then be sure to (insert safety tip here)." You can't tell a kid not to do something, tell him how to do it "safely," and then not expect him to do it. Despite claims to the contrary, there are 10 scientific evaluations showing that real abstinence programs can be highly effective in reducing early sexual activity. Moreover, real abstinence education is a fairly young field; thus, the number of evaluations of abstinence programs at present is somewhat limited. In the near future, many additional evaluations that demonstrate the effectiveness of abstinence education will become available. Conventional "safe sex" programs (sometimes erroneously called "abstinence plus" programs) place little or no emphasis on encouraging young people to abstain from early sexual activity. Instead, such programs strongly promote condom use and implicitly condone sexual activity among teens. Nearly all such programs contain material and messages that would be alarming and offensive to the overwhelming majority of parents. Significantly, research shows that condom use offers relatively little protection (from "zero" to "some") for herpes and no protection from the deadly HPV. A review of the scientific literature reveals that, on average, condoms failed to prevent the transmission of the HIV virus--which causes the immune deficiency syndrome known as AIDS--between 15 percent and 31 percent of the time. It should not be surprising, therefore, that while condom use has increased over the past 25 years, the spread of STDs has likewise continued to rise. http://www.heritage.org... Condoms, while better than nothing, should not be promoted so much in schools. It is one thing to inform children of their options and a complete different thing to promote safe sex as a lifestyle. By making the idea of safe sex more attractive to teenagers you are also making sex itself more attractive. You are in a way telling them that they can be safe having sex and this has an encouraging effect to start. By making them feel that by using these products they are protected from any risks it only makes them more eager to start having sexual relations. They are physically not prepared for that and the medical reasons for why they are at greater risk is specifically related to females. A 15-year-old girl has a 1-in-8 chance of developing pelvic inflammatory disease simply by having sex, whereas a 24-year-old woman has only a 1-in-80 chance in that situation. And pills and condoms are not as effective with teenagers, mainly because teens are more apt to forget to take the pill or to tear a condom. Between 9% and 18% of teenage girls using the contraceptive pill become pregnant. There is without a doubt an STD epidemic amongst teenagers at the moment, but for quite some time the media and schools have been teaching these teenagers about how to have safe sex. We must now take a hard look at the message of safe sex which is being taught to these teens. People believe that if the teens can be taught how to have safe sex, the number of pregnant teens and the rate of STD infection will reduced dramatically. But they've been teaching them this for some time now and the statistics and our own common sense tell us something different. What if the increasing number of teenagers that are sexually active and that have STDs are actually the consequence of promoting safe sex to them? For these reasons, the CON side has won the debate.