Anti-abstinence, ‘Safe Sex’ Recommendations are Challenged by Minority Report
Do You Know What Your Children are Being Taught in Sex Ed Health Class?
You’re Teaching My Kid What? Exposing the Sex-Ed Biz
Unveiling the Truth of Contraception
Teen Girls & Risky Sex
"Indirect Sex" Exposes Brits to STDs from Millions — It's All Connected
Fast Fact from The Medical Institute: Hispanic Teen Pregnancy Rates
Red Letter Rebels
Commentary: Pornography and You
Resource: How Adult Pornography Contributes to Sexual Exploitation of Children…
Anti-abstinence, ‘Safe Sex’ Recommendations are Challenged by Minority Report Members of CDC Panel: Study-team dissenters issue a minority report, indicating that CDC conclusions are not supported by data.
The minority report can be downloaded from the Institute for Research and Evaluation website at http://instituteresearch.com/
Free Teens USA notes: Unfortunately, the average policy maker, teacher or physician will only hear the main-stream media's loud bullhorn, "Abstinence education does not work!", or Nancy Pelosi's rant, "Abstinence education is dangerous for our children!"
Please share the following information with interested others…
CDC ANTI-ABSTINENCE REPORT DEBUNKED BY INSIDERS: STUDY TEAM DISSENTERS SAY RESULTS CONFLICT WITH DATA
Two members of the Centers for Disease Control team that evaluated studies of sex education programs have raised alarms, reporting that the data actually conflict with the agency's stated conclusion that Comprehensive Sex Education (CSE) programs are working, emphasizing "safe sex" over Abstinence-based Sex Education (AE).
The alarms are being raised by Irene Ericksen and Danielle Ruedt, two members of a CDC panel. This panel evaluated dozens of studies and came up with a conclusion supporting so-called "comprehensive" programs that teach children to use condoms.
In their minority report, however, Ericksen and Ruedt warn policymakers and educators against relying too heavily on the majority document.
http://instituteresearch.com/docs/Minority_Report_CDC_Meta-Analysis_%2811-7-09%29.pdf
"According to this minority report, the study recommendations may mislead policymakers by presenting conclusions that do not match key study findings," confirmed Paul Birch, chief of the Institute for Research and Evaluation. "The report is important because it allows differing views on this research to be presented at a time when Congress is re-examining sex education policy."
The overall study, called "Group-based Interventions to Prevent Adolescent Pregnancy, HIV, and Other STDs," confirmed the effectiveness of programs that include condom instruction. It was based on the compilation of 83 studies performed from 1980 through 2007 and was released just in time to be considered for President Obama's request to cut funding from abstinence education programs and allocate it to comprehensive programs that teach kids to use condoms.
But according to Ericksen, a research analyst with the Institute for Research and Evaluation in Salt Lake City, the statistics inside the study showed no difference between abstinence education and so-called "comprehensive sex education" on key factors including teen condom use, sexual activity, pregnancy and STDs.
According to the South-Dakota-based Abstinence Clearinghouse, <http://www.abstinence.net>, the statistics actually revealed that abstinence programs produced a significant reduction in teen sexual activity, as documented by 10 studies from six authors.
"But the researchers discounted these results because several randomized AE studies showed lesser effects, even though these studies had important design problems that called into question their impact," the organization reported.
Leslee Unruh, president of Abstinence Clearinghouse, said the report that may not be supported by its documentation is troubling.
"These results present a different picture than the study's published conclusions, especially for school-based CSE," she said. "Policymakers deserve accurate information regarding the lack of effects of these condom-centered programs.
"Moreover, the emotional health of our children is as important as their physical health, and condom education fails youth in both of these areas. Abstinence education protects both," she said.
The underlying statistics were not being released by the CDC, the minority report said.
"The Task Force has made public its Recommendation Statements without also making available to the public the full set of study findings upon which the recommendations are based, both supporting and otherwise. The reason given for this decision is that the data from the study have not yet been scientifically cleared by the CDC for release to the public.
"However, this policy prevents the public from scrutinizing the body of evidence underlying the CDC Task Force Recommendations in the same time frame in which the CDC recommendations will be influencing the decisions of policymakers and public health professionals," the report said.
Unruh told WND that there is a huge danger releasing conclusions that are not adequately supported by evidence.
Policymakers in state legislatures and in Washington will determine which programs should be given state and federal dollars. However, without accurate information, it is pouring money down the drain.
The CDC study was a meta-analysis of dozens of studies of sex education programs in the U.S., and the assumptions presented by the majority found comprehensive sex education programs are generally effective in both community and school settings.
"The effectiveness of school-based programs is crucial, since the school classroom is where most teens receive sex education," said Ruedt, the Public Health Programs Coordinator for the Georgia Governor's Office of Children and Families.
"Yet the report's conclusion that comprehensive sex education programs are generally effective in schools settings is contradicted by some of the data upon which the report is based."
Ericksen described the underlying problem as a fundamental research error: the effort combined widely varying types of sex education programs and then made generalized assumptions for all of them.
"The resulting internal inconsistency in the results indicates there are many types of CSE programs that do not work, yet the study concludes that CSE programs are broadly effective. This, along with the lack of
evidence for school-based programs, makes the study's recommendations potentially misleading to policy-makers who want to implement evidence-based programs, especially in schools," said Ericksen.
The minority report found that the documentation reviewed actually overstates "the likelihood that any single (CSE) program will be effective in protecting the sexual health of adolescents, especially the school-based programs, which are the focus of the public policy debate about sex education."
Further, the misleading information will "impact the future health of millions of adolescents across the country."
"The CDC recommendations also fail to acknowledge the evidence for the effectiveness of abstinence education (AE) programs at reducing teen sexual activity, and invite conclusions that CSE is a superior approach to AE, which is not supported by the evidence."
The entire study's validity was undermined by the meta-analysis process to combine "apples and oranges," the minority report said. Also, there is such a level of "internal inconsistency" over the types of sex education programs, that the results should be suspect, the two wrote.
Further, the overall study included oral contraceptives under a category that included protection against pregnancy and STDs, a completely incorrect categorization, they said. And it categorizes the behavior of abstinence the same as the behavior of using a condom, which "can be misleading and confusing," they said.
Despite the dangers presented by the study and its documentation, the Washington Post reported [inaccurately], based on the CDC's information, that comprehensive programs, those that instruct about condom use, actually "effectively" reduce risky sexual behavior and cut STDs.
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Do You Know What Your Children are Being Taught in Sex Ed Health Class?
Are you concerned about what American youth are being taught regarding sex and relationships?
Here are 10 of 21 Questions You Should Ask about Public School Sex Education:
…2) Why are youth even in elementary school exposed to sex education that assumes that they will be sexually active?
3) Why are sexually active middle-school and high-school students more likely to be depressed and to attempt suicide?
4) Why did Alfred Kinsey, the father of sex research, seek out convicted sex offenders, saying their behavior was typical of males? Why did he say that adult-child sex was "harmless"?
5) How are fraudulent statistics regarding STD prevention and effectiveness of condoms used to mislead educators and parents?
6) Why did 5 of 6 "health experts" say to Congress that they oppose abstinence-centered education, even if it proves to be effective?
7) Why do married couples who are faithful enjoy sex the most?
8) Why do parents, once they understand what abstinence-centered sex education actually teaches, prefer it to "comprehensive" sex education by 2:1?
9) How does abstinence-centered education save American taxpayers BILLIONS?
10) Why is character-based, whole-person sexuality education the most effective and urgently needed in our nation's schools?
For answers to these and 11 more questions, visit http://thewaronintimacy.com/twoi/?e=freeteensusa
***************
Richard Panzer, Ph.D. Free Teens USA http://www.freeteensusa.org
http://www.freeteensyouth.com
http://culturemachine.com
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
[12 November 2009, WorldNetDaily, http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=115673]
You’re Teaching My Kid What? Exposing the Sex-Ed Biz
This commentary contains material that may not be suitable for children.
Dr. Miriam Grossman was lecturing at a Philadelphia college about sexual health. The students had invited her to talk about something they’d never encountered in all their years of sex education—the dangers of non-marital sex.
Grossman will never forget the girl who told her that everything she’d said about sexually transmitted diseases was correct. “I always used condoms, but I got HPV anyway, and it’s one of the high-risk types,” the girl said. If the infection did not go away, she had a 40 percent chance of developing cervical cancer.
In her new book, You’re Teaching My Child What?, Grossman says she felt “a wave of sorrow” at the girl’s words—but she was hardly surprised. The girl was yet another victim of a destructive philosophy that has been forced on America’s youth under the guise of “sex education.”
The sex-ed lobby has always claimed it was all about health—teaching kids how to stay safe. But in reality, their goal was not preventing disease, pregnancy, and emotional distress.
It’s about indoctrinating them into a radical ideology—sexual freedom.
Kids are urged to consult websites that urge them to begin “exploring” their sexuality at a young age, insist that sex at any age is a right, and encourage them to engage in bizarre and dangerous activities.
The findings of science are not allowed to interfere with these radical teachings.
If new research proves the dangers of the behaviors they advocate, the so-called “sexperts” simply ignore it.
For instance, sex educators urge kids to avoid pregnancy by engaging in oral sex. But two years ago, cancer specialists found that oral cancers were on the rise among young adults, who used to be at very low risk if they did not smoke or drink.
If kids interact with five or more partners, they increase their risk “a whopping 250 percent.”
And yet sex educators, Grossman writes, portray this activity as safe and normal.
What’s the result of this teaching? One in four American girls now has a sexually transmitted disease.
What do the sex educators say about this? They shrug it off, telling kids that “most” people contract an STD in their lifetime—as if such a thing were normal and unavoidable.
This ought to make us really angry.
The “comprehensive” sex educators have done enormous harm to our kids. They keep right on teaching kids that life is a sexual-free-for-all with no consequences as long as they use so-called “protection.”
Read Dr. Miriam Grossman’s book, You’re Teaching My Child What?
You can get a copy at BreakPoint.org.
And then, share it with the teens in your life.
They need to know the truth—that while STDs, cervical cancer, and heartbreak may be increasingly common, they are no more “normal” than swine flu.
Once again, science is backing up the truth [that] sex ought to occur exclusively within the context of marriage. And anybody who tells us otherwise is sacrificing truth, science, and the health of our children.
[November 10, 2009, breakpoint.org]
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Unveiling Contraception
By Jenn Giroux
It is important to take a hard look at the research that is reported from Planned Parenthood's own research arm, The Guttmacher Institute. Any discerning eye can see that their recent results ("Unsafe abortions kill 70,000 a year," Oct. 14) always point to the need for more contraception availability and abortion.
Their president, Sharon Camp, states that the actual health and survival of women is damaged by highly restricted and unsafe abortion. She pushes the myth that birth control distribution and availability actually drives down the abortion rate. It is well documented by Camp's own employer that 56 percent of women who present for abortions do so from failed birth control. Abortion advocates who push contraceptives on unsuspecting women unquestionably know this.
As a registered nurse for 24 years, I have seen the physical, mental, psychological, and spiritual damage done to women from abortion and contraception. Clearly, the most healthy and effective means of assisting women in America and around the world is by teaching God's plan for abstinence when not married and Natural Family Planning within marriage. Thankfully, the Catholic Church has always stood firmly for the good of women and families.
In the late 1960s, it was very difficult for many to understand why the Church refused to allow the use of The Pill. Today, hindsight is 20/20. Divorce, adultery, STDs, plummeting birth rates … it is obvious that the Church was right. America no longer loves children and refuses to trust God with the unpredictable.
And now we are exporting this evil embrace around the world.
This recent report also states that women are dying from abortions in third-world countries due to unsanitary conditions and unskilled practitioners who are performing them. To this I can only say: Welcome to America. The very nature and environment of abortion clinics here and around the world are unregulated, unsanitary, and unrestricted.
Women deserve the real truth – not the statistical results as seen through the rosy glasses of Planned Parenthood's Guttmacher Institute, which brings the abortion industry more business and women more heartache. Contraception must be exposed for the evil and ugliness that it is. It doesn't prevent abortion. It leads to it.
[28Oct09, omsoul.com, Originally published in the Cincinnati Enquirer, 10/19/2009]
Teen Girls and Risky Sex
It's tempting to assume that teenage girls who have unprotected sex at an early age do so because they're hot to trot, in a hurry and ill-informed.
But new research suggests things are much more complicated than that. Reporting in the November issue of Pediatrics, University of Pittsburgh researchers found a complex set of relationships between high-school girls' actual and self-perceived body weight and their likelihood of having engaged in various risky sexual behaviors. These included having intercourse before turning 13, having sex with more than four partners, consuming alcohol in connection with sex and having sex without a condom.
Those relationships varied according to ethnicity, which makes the situation even more tricky to sort out.
In brief, the study found that:
Caucasian girls who thought they were underweight — whether they actually were or not — were more likely to have had sex and to have had four or more sexual partners than those who thought their weight was normal.
Caucasian girls who were truly overweight were less likely to use condoms.
Underweight African-American girls were less likely to use condoms than those of normal weight, and overweight African-American girls were more likely to report four or more sexual partners.
Latina girls of all weights were more likely to engage in a wide variety of risky sexual behaviors, from lack of condom use and sex before age 13 to having more than four sexual partners during their teens and using alcohol.
Breaking from findings in earlier studies, the new research found no association between high-school girls' body-mass index — which indicates whether a body is under-, over- or of normal weight — and their ever having had sex.
On the other hand, girls who perceived themselves as overweight were less likely to ever have had sex.
"Our data suggest that knowing how a girl perceives her weight may be as important as knowing her actual weight," the study concludes. It notes that attitudes about ideal weight vary according to ethnicity and culture and should be considered, too, when devising targeted sex-education programs.
Last week's Washington Post article about Irene Vilar, who had 15 abortions, the first at age 18, before finally deciding to follow through with a pregnancy and who now is the mother of two young girls, illustrates what is clearly an extreme situation.
As the article notes, Vilar became pregnant soon after her first sexual encounter. "Over the next 15 years," the story continues, she seesaws between taking birth-control pills and "forgetting" to take them.
She returns time and again to abortion clinics despite the pleadings of doctors and friends. In a convoluted way, she feels a sense of control because she can start a pregnancy and she can end it.
Vilar's story, like the Pediatrics study, reminds us that girls and young women often engage in sex for reasons that may have little to do with unbridled physical desire.
By Jennifer LaRue Huget | November 2, 2009; 7:00 AM ET | View or post comments | Category: Sex , Teens , Women's Health
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/checkup/2009/11/teen_girls_weight_and_risky_se.html#more
“INDIRECT SEX” EXPOSES BRITS TO STDs FROM MILLIONS
Although the average British man has only slept with nine people and woman with 6.3, when an online calculator factored in the prior sexual contacts of each of the contacts and so on for six “generations,” it revealed the astounding average number of exposures to be 2.8 million people, one price of a sexually promiscuous society.
"When we sleep with someone, we are, in effect, not only sleeping with them, but also their previous partners and their partners' previous partners, and so on," said Clare Kerr, head of sexual health at Lloydspharmacy.
Is it any wonder we are facing an epidemic of STD’s?
[http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090923/hl_afp/lifestylebritainhealthsex; www.abstinence.net, 29Sept09)
Fast Fact from The Me
dical Institute
Hispanic females aged 15-19 years, when compared to white or black, non-Hispanic females in the same age group, have a higher pregnancy rate (132.8- H vs. 45.2 – W vs. 128.0 – B per 100,000 persons), more first time sex partners that are >4 years older (35% vs. 20% vs. 19%), and a lower proportion ever having talked to a parent about sexual health topics before the age of 18 (65% vs. 72% vs. 74%), respectively.
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sexual and reproductive health of persons aged 10-24 years – United States, 2002-2007. Surveillance Summaries, July 17, 2009. MMWR 2009;58(No.SS-6).[29September 2009, HIV Vaccine Update, The Medical Institute, www.medinstitute.org]
Red Letter Rebels
Be a Rebel. Choose Abstinence.
It's a website with attitude and big, red "A's."
Just listen: "The red letter "A" represents the choice to be abstinent. In today's society, the social norm is sexual promiscuity, with an ideology that sexual activity whenever and with whoever is harmless and carries no consequences. The choice of abstinence, voluntarily choosing to save sex for marriage, is an act of rebellion against this social norm and will not only help to avoid physical, mental, emotional and social consequences but will help to reach goals and dreams in life."
For more on the More2Life program, go to http://www.redletterrebels.com/
[www.abstinence.net, 29Sept09]
PORNOGRAPHY AND YOU
by Rebecca Hagelin
When otherwise “responsible” adults are slaves to the smut, is it any surprise that adolescents are easily addicted when exposed to porn during their hormone-driven years?
We have never before raised an entire generation on porn, so we don't know how damaging the far-reaching affects will be…
Research shows that the images "encourage and stimulate anger and aggression" in users and causes them to treat other people as objects.
Children who use porn have a lack of interest in marriage and in having children of their own, and are at an increased risk of developing sexual compulsions and addictive behavior.
[http://townhall.com/columnists/RebeccaHagelin/2009/09/22/pornography_and_you ; www.abstinence.net, 29Sept09]
RESOURCE: HOW ADULT PORNOGRAPHY CONTRIBUTES TO SEXUAL EXPLOITATION OF CHILDREN
Morality in Media has compiled this heavily-documented, forty-page report on the devastating effects of porn use by adults on children and youth. Read it and understand how too many teens and children become victims of a hyper-sexualized culture. From the report:
The explosion of hardcore adult pornography on the Internet and elsewhere is contributing to sexual exploitation of children in a variety of ways, including the following:
• Perpetrators use adult pornography to groom their victims.
• For many perpetrators there is a progression from viewing adult pornography to viewing child pornography.
• Johns act out what they view in adult pornography with child prostitutes, and pimps use adult pornography to instruct child prostitutes.
• Children imitate behavior they view in adult pornography with other children.
• Perpetrators use adult pornography to sexually arouse themselves.
• Addiction to adult pornography destroys marriages, and children raised in one-parent households are more likely to be sexually exploited.
[http://www.obscenitycrimes.org/helppornproblems.php ; www.abstinence.net, 29Sept09]