Jeffrey Quick's Blog: Abstain from abstinence ed.

Abstain from abstinence ed.

Well, apparently abstinence education doesn't work.

It's odd that people support it, because many of the people in favor of abstinence education don't think that the public schools are doing a good job on the basics. If they can't teach reading, how can they teach chastity? "But the liberal education establishment teaches their values all the time." Well, that's right: their values. You can't effectively teach values you don't believe in. Bourgeois Marxism isn't taught in school; it's inhaled as it seeps out of the pores of everyone involved. And if the faculty of a public school believed as firmly in chastity, the Religious Right would be partying like it's 1870 (don't make the tea too strong, and make sure the piano legs have their pants on). But they don't; indeed there are increasing numbers of incidents where faculty of either sex have decided that high school is their own personal Chicken Ranch. If you really want your kid to have a chaste education, it needs to be administered by chaste educators, which in practice means a Christian school. But then, this was never about abstinence ed for your kids; it was about abstinence ed for everybody's kids.

I'll say it again, and you'll call me an unfeeling brute again: the best abstinence ed is for teenage girls to watch their babies go hungry or without medical care.

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Comments

Posted by: rightwingprof
Posted on: April 16, 2007 01:13 PM

There's a conflicting study out that shows teenaged pregnancies at their lowest since records were first kept in 1940. However, I don't see that it's the government's job to spend millions of dollars on abstinence programs any more than handing out free condoms.

"I'll say it again, and you'll call me an unfeeling brute again: the best abstinence ed is for teenage girls to watch their babies go hungry or without medical care."

Exactly.

Posted by: Jeffrey Quick
Posted on: April 16, 2007 01:33 PM

This being the 21st century, fewer babies don't necessarily mean less sex (which is what the other study was measuring). If condom use were up for fear of AIDS, that itself could explain the fewer babies. Add in "gay-until-graduation" and, uh, "Clintonian relations" and one could have quite a bit of non-reproductive sex that would give an abstinence ed teacher a fit. It could even mean falling biological fertility over a similar number of sex acts.