The physical toll alone is stunning: My Heritage Foundation colleague Robert Rector notes that each year more than 3 million teens contract a sexually transmitted disease. According to a February 2004 report by the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, almost half of new STD cases occur among people aged 15-24, and at least half of sexually active youth will have acquired an STD by age 25. Worse, Rector says, sexually active teens are three times more likely than their non-sexually active peers to become depressed and to attempt suicide.
Which makes it an odd time for a federal lawmaker to be trying to make it tougher for schools to teach abstinence. Yet that?s exactly what Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) is doing, Rector says, via legislation that Baucus will introduce soon.
?The Baucus anti-abstinence plan would take federal funds that are devoted to teaching abstinence and turn them over to state public health bureaucracies to spend as they will,? Rector wrote in a recent op-ed. ?Since these bureaucracies have been wedded for decades to ?safe sex? and fiercely opposed to teaching abstinence, the implications of this change are obvious.?
Why would Sen. Baucus want to do this? If anything, we need more emphasis on abstinence, not less. That?s exactly what the vast majority of parents say: According to a Zogby poll, more than 90 percent say that society should teach kids to abstain from sex until they have at least finished high school, and almost nine in 10 want schools to teach youth to abstain from sex until they?re married or in an adult relationship that?s close to marriage.
The problem is that interest groups such as the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, or SIECUS, carry a huge amount of weight with certain lawmakers. And because they push ?the far boundaries of sexual permissiveness,? as Rector puts it, they want to destroy abstinence. SIECUS, believe it or not, has published articles touting incest and prostitution, insisting that sex educators need to ?advocate good sex for teens.?
But the only ?good sex for teens? is none at all. In a society awash in pornographic images and language, that?s a difficult message for parents to insist on. But if they care about their kids, insist on it they must.