California Prop. 73Follow

You may not have mentioned virginity, but if you are comparing abstinence historically to abstinence today, then you have to deal with the fact that virginity was, in fact, the goal. If it's NOT the goal now, then that simply enforces what I was saying, that you are comparing apples and oranges.

Furthermore, you are making the assumption that unwed mother = welfare mother, and that is not always the case. Women are plenty capable of supporting themselves AND their children if they are sufficiently educated, are given a fair shot and are sufficiently motivated. The ones who most commonly end up on welfare are the ones who are already from impovershed areas, have insufficient access to health care and birth control and education regarding how to use birth control effectively.

If you want to decrease the instance of life-devastating unwanted pregnancies (note, I do not say "unwed pregnancies" because they are NOT the same thing--there are plenty of married welfare moms in impovershed areas as well, whose husbands either can't or simply won't work) fix the education system, first and foremost. Think about where the teen pregnancy hot spots are around the country. They are in the poor rural areas and in the inner cities, the two areas where schools receive insufficient funding. Statistically, suburban areas with better school districts have a much lower incidence of teen pregnancy than inner-city and rural schools where the quality of education is insufficient. Educate kids better and the rates at which they get knocked up will decrease. If they know they have a future out there that looks better than their past, then they are less likely to risk that future.

If you took ALL the kids belonging to welfare moms today, took them out of their impovershed neighborhoods and transplanted them into middle-class neighborhoods with highly rated schools where they could get a good education with the promise of fully subsidized college after high school, within a generation, you would find the rate at which those kids become second-generation welfare moms would drop DRASTICALLY.

But the "conservatives" aren't interested in doing that. They would rather spend billions of dollars on a totally unnecessary war that just happens to put money in the pockets of wealthy defense contractors than they are in improving the education system. They decry the fact that unwed mothers are "leeches" on the system and that welfare simply perpetuates the problem. Welfare doesn't perpetuate the problem. The endless cycle of poverty created by this half-assed system of welfare perpetuates the problem. Hopelessness perpetuates the problem. Ignorance perpetuates the problem. If you took the present generation of kids on welfare and gave them an honest-to-god fighting chance, the problem would correct itself.




Oh, yeah, blah blah blah...it's all the liberals fault that the industrial revolution happened, which lead to the invention of mass media. It's the liberals fault that in the last century, we gained the ability to wage wars on a global scale, and that historically sexual mores always loosen during wartime. It's all the liberals fault that Vietnam occurred and precipitated the formation of the rebellious counter-culture of the 60s and the sexual revolution among the children born in the post WWII baby boom.

It's absolutely IDIOTIC to say the liberals created the present-day society where unmarried sex is commonplace and accepted. Historical factors that have nothing to do with ones political stance created the world we live in. So give over the bullsh[u][/u]it finger pointing.

You can't undo history. All you can do is try to make present-day life work the best you can.



Well, that's all well and good, but maybe the people we really need to be teaching that to are the ones who are in the most danger, the ones we're presently not teaching ANYTHING to because we're dismissing them as leeches on society.



No, that's not the goal, because to change those, you have to undo the entire history that led to those being a problem. You need to deal in the NOW rather than all this stupid "oh, well, let's go back to what used to work" oversimplification.



That's because there's never been "contraceptive only" education. There has never been a sex ed program that hasn't made it clear that the only SURE way to avoid pregnancy and disease is to abstain. From there, how effective the program is directly corrolates to how well it educates. So your claim that "contraceptive only" education doesn't work is utterly irrelevent, because there is no such animal.

Which is exactly the language that the current Liberal agenda wants to remove from sex-ed classes. In the same way that the Religious Right folks want to remove mention of contraceptives.

I'm just saying that it's the polarization on this issue that prevents us from arriving at a sane solution.


And Yanari. You are correct. People have had sex outside of marriage all along. I think you are horribly mistaken about the rates of such things happening though. A hundred years ago, only a small percentage of women had sex prior to getting married, and those that did were having sex with one guy, and that was likely the guy she intended to marry. The rate of teens having sex with multiple partners was so low as to be statistically irrelevant. Today, it's common. Most teen girls have boyfriends, right? Most of them have multipole boyfriends furing their HS years alone. And most of those are having sex with each of them.

This is something that simply did not happen in the past. It didn't happen because the risks from engaging in that level of sexual activity were too great. With widely available and effective birth control, we've reduced those risks tremendously. However, a side effect of that has been that teends think they are "safe", so they have sex far more often and with many more partners then they did back then. The result is predictable. A vastly increased rate of single mothers.


How else do you explin it? Clearly, we have better birth control options today then back then, right? Clearly, if teens were having sex as often and with as many partners back then as today, we'd expect to see *huge* rates of unwed mothers, right? But what we see is the opposite. The only conclusion is that they were *not* engaging in that level of sexual activity back then. It's really all about degrees. Saying they did is irrelevant. Of course some teens had sex back then. It's the rate at which they did it that matters.

I agree. Cite?





Edited, Sat Oct 15 22:51:49 2005 by trickybeck

No, no.. it's true. Liberals live in constant fear that, should teens ever discover the esoteric secret that you don't get pregnant if you don't have sex, all our dreams will be shattered and trampled underfoot. We must do all in our power to assure that knowledge is never leaked to the public!

God, what a ******

I went to public schools for my whole life and when I reached 6th grade, we learned about sex-ed. We also had another overview in health (9th grade) which was actually better overall info and technique-wise.

As is usually the case, it was pointed out that abstinence is the only 100% method of preventing pregnancy's and STD's. That out of the way, they went and showed us every conceivable method of birth control and how to use it. They also gave us a nice healthy list of STD's which was enough to scare most of us.

This method is in my opinion the best. It teaches all the risks, gives options to prevent those risks to a small percentage, and a method to totally bypass those risks.

If a child (in America at least) is doing everything they should be doing, attending class and asking questions, or just listening, all this should be understood. It's presented in easy to process information that even the slowest of children in a class can understand.

Onto teen pregnancy.
Not only should children/teens be attending these classes but they should also be talking about this with a guardian/parent/brother/sister/aunt etc to make sure they are getting the information they should be. As statistics show, teenage pregnancy is occuring far more frequently in recent decades. I don't know the percentage, but the population has been growing exponentially for the last few hundred years.

As the population grows, so does more chances for these pregnancy's to occur. Teaching an abstinence only based education is really actually cheating children. They will continue to believe these stupid lies about preventive pregnacy measures. PULLING OUT IS NOT A METHOD OF BIRTH CONTROL. But yet if you remember your classes, it's almost always mentioned by a student who truly believes it's a safe method. People are going to continue to have sex, the only way you can combat both STD's and pregnancy is to educate people. Just because you decide to only expose people to one side of the issue, doesn't mean they won't figure it out on their own.

Anyone with some intelligence and a little time on their hands can look at a poster of both a male and female and see that one spot where the man has a phallus and the woman a *******. What does 2+2 equal? I truly think some of these religious zealots think it's 5.

As all these poll and percentage happy people throw their numbers around, you have to realize that there are no percentage numbers on the teen pregnancey rates from 1600, 1700, 1800 or even 1900. For all we know these polls are different because communication methods have gotten better over the last 50 years.

Remember, at certain points in our history, the average human lifespan was considered to be around 35. Therefore, you might even consider some of those kids to be middle-aged.

All those raging hormones might be raging for a reason. Your body is practically shouting at you "OI YOU, wake up, we're ready to make some babies!!"

Seems like it's one step closer to repealing Roe v Wade. If that happens, we'll all be hearing the stories of girls and women who will never be able to have more children after they've become mangled by some back-room "doctor" or worse, dead.

And the women who are too scared to have an illegal abortion will just be raising unwanted children who stand the chance of being neglected, abused or killed.

Yippee.

the above was brought to you by Ms. Obvious. I just like to hear the sound of my own typing

But you are misrepresenting what it said. NO WHERE did it say teaching "contraception only" and never mentioning abstinence, which is what you were saying "liberals" wanted to happen. All it says is emphasizing responsible decision making even if that means putting less of an emphasis on abstinence.

Thanks to recovering from surgery, I've been channel surfing quite a bit these days out of lack of anything better to do. And today on SpikeTV, I came across an ad for Trojan condoms. The subtitles on that commercial contained this exact verbiage:

"Other than abstinence, there is only one way to protect yourself." (you can see a similar commercial with the exact same verbiage here-- http://www.trojancondoms.com/)

Now, far more than any teacher, any social movement, anyone at all, who has a vested interest in ENCOURAGING people to have sex? Contraceptive companies. Because if you don't have sex, they don't make any money.

So it would be against a condom company's financial interests to promote, or even mention, abstinence...and yet, they do. Do you honestly expect that educators would be LESS mindful of the health benefits of abstinence than a company that makes its money off people having sex?




Define "relatively new." I took sex ed in 1988 and the message was "Abstinence is the only 100% sure way, but if you're not going to abstain, here are your options." Sounds like "abstinence plus" education to me.




I can't speak for everyone, but from my own experience, that is not true. "Abstinence Only" is pretty straightforward...it's a program that insists upon abstinence and neglects to educate on other ways to protect oneself. And that is exactly the kind of program that more and more studies are showing to be disseminating incomplete, inaccurate, misleading, and outright FALSE information regarding sexual health and safety. The result of this dissemination of bad info is that our kids are making choices when they are less than fully informed, and are therefore making unhealthy choices. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26623-2004Dec1.html)



The federally funded programs that were implemented at the beginning of the Bush administrations "faith-based initiative" heyday WERE "abstinence only" programs. And they have been shown to do more harm than good and putting our children at risk.




Any RESPONSIBLE AND SANE proponent of "safe sex" education would never refuse to mention abstinence as you claim, because it's just plain old common sense that of all option, abstinence is the most effective at disease and pregnancy prevention. If the goal of the program is keeping our children healthy, then it's going to mention abstinence.

Likewise. My late 80's sex-ed class certainly mentioned abstinence at the only 'sure thing' as well as talking about contraceptive techniques.

Has anyone here taken as sex-ed class that DIDN'T mention abstinence?

Edit: Reading the survey itself, it says that 19% of the respondents consider themselves liberal, 24% conservative and 50% either moderate or having no opinion on it. Yet, 36% felt that abstinence shouldn't be the focus of sex-ed! Why, how could this be if it's such a radical Liberal Agenda move to think that abstinence shouldn't be the focus? Insanity, I tell you. Wacky insanity.

Edited, Mon Oct 17 22:09:10 2005 by Jophiel

Alright folks let me state the following things before I post:

1. I am a parent of a boy and a girl
2. I am Pro-Life
3. I am my kids father

Anybody can say what they want about me or my beliefs. So if you want to flame me just for that fine, whatever, Welcome to America - The Land of the Free!

So with all of that said, I am for Prop. 73, if I lived in California.

The whole thing to me boils down to the parents. "We" as parents are responsible for our kids, and their actions. If our kids ***** up, and they will, we will have to deal with it. If "we" raised our children in a good enviroment they would approach us if they had a problem.

Just ask my wife, when she was 17 and got pregant she told her parents. If she didn't who knows what would have happened.

But some people think that parents should not be informed of their children's possible life altering decisions. The fact is abortion is a life altering decision, and parents since we are responsible should be kept aware and informed!

The key word to the quoted statement is "illegal" **** happens when you attempt to perform an illegal action. That is just a fact of lie. Speeding runs a chance of getting a ticket or worse killing someone!

Call me a positive person, but I think even an unwanted child can be loved!

Yes. And if it wasn't in a set in which it was obviously differentiated from the "abstinence plus" position (in which abstinence is listed as the only 100% effective birth control, then goes on to discuss contraceptives), then you'd have a point.

What other difference is there between that position and the abstinence-plus position Joph? There *must* be, or they wouldn't be separate positions. And it's more then just the word abstinence. They're talking about teaching the ethics of sex rather then just the mechanics of sex. What you're essentially doing is compressing an entire position into one line and then declaring that it's what's already being taught in schools.

I'm serious here. What is the difference between the abstinence-plus position and the safe-sex position in that article? While I only linked that one, I literally ran across a dozen which all broke down different approaches to sex education into the same three catagories. If abstinence-only teaches only abstinence and nothing else, and abstinence-plus teaches abstinence *and* contraception, then what does the other one teach?

From everything I read, that difference is that the "safe-sex" (I'm calling it that, but it's called several different things in different sources) specifically avoids any sort of ethical analysis of sexuality, focusing only on the physical aspects (how and what). That's pretty darn close to the "contraceptive-only" position I was mentioning earlier.



No. Because I'd have to find articles and position papers by Liberals on the subject, but since the whole abstinence-only debate is the "big thing" right now, it's impossible to find. And that's before considering the trend of Liberals to state what they are against rather then what they are for. All I could find was page after page of Liberal rants about abstinence-only education.

It's not in what is said directly, but what's said indirectly. The labels applied to various positions. "Safe sex" implies that what's being taught is how to have sex safely, not whether or not to have sex in the first place. How ubiquitous is that phrase now? Who do you think coined it? Probably not conservatives...

Here's another example of language and assumptions applied on this issue (most of this article is irrelvant to the topic btw, but interesting in its own right). This part sticks out:



Hmmm... Why say the whole "despite" bit? She's lauding Clinton's support of abstinance-plus, not because it's a good position, but because it distances him from the far Left a bit. The key assumption here though is that abstinence plus really is a bad thing because it's "diverting funds from sex ed to abstinence ed". Hmmmm... That certainly supports my assertions. The very statement assumes that a mention of abstinence can't be included in any real sex-ed program, doesn't it?

I could go on. Again. You wont find a Liberal position paper saying: "We're opposed to any sort of sex-education that includes the word abstinence in it". What you will find is example after example of liberals making assumptive statements that abstinence and sex-ed are completely incompatible concepts. What am I left to conclude other then that there is a Liberal agenda (not saying it's held by all Liberals of course) to remove any mention of abstinence from sex-ed classes?

Aw crap. Yeah. I misread that bit. Weird. I could have sworn it said abstinence-plus. Ok. Whatever. Ignore that one then...


Um. You're still missing the forest for the trees. Yes. Much of our curriculum "mentions" abstinence, but does not really convey it as the best way to avoid pregnancy and/or STDs, nor do they include any significant amount of discussion of the ethics surrounding sexual activity.

This is the new sex-ed course for 8th graders being proposed in Washington. Take a gander at the topics and curriculum. Note that the word "abstinence" isn't actually mentioned in the in-class discussion parts once, nor as any given section to be discussed. There are huge sections about how to manage getting pregnant, and pre-natal care, but no discussion about maybe not having sex in the first place.

Abstinence is only included in a couple in-class videos. Can you honestly look at this curriculum and say that abstinence is treated as anything other then an alternative to the "norm" of sexual activity? Heck. There's a half dozen different sections discussing homosexual behavior, but not one for abstinence? A whole section on sexual identity?


This is an actual curriculum Joph. Not what someone's proposing. Not something just being discussed. But actual information being taught to 8th graders this year. Now, in actual fact, I happen to agree with a good amount of it. However, it very clearly downplays any importance to abstinence. Sure. It's mentioned, but almost in passing. I would have to assume that the parts written specifically are intended to be lessons the kids will learn, and therefore recieve a greater focus then the hand-outs and videos. The mechanics of how a ***** work gets more in-class discussion time then a discussion of abstinence. In fact, based on the curriculum, abstinence isn't going to be discussed in class at all. Just show the kids a video and move on...

XII. Abstinence
A. Define and describe
B. Only 100% effective means of pregnancy prevention
C. Only 100% effective means of preventing sexually transmitted diseases
D. Preservation of self-concept/self-esteem
1. you decide when and if you want to become sexually active
2. consider the consequences and you make a decision
3. only you are responsible for your own behavior
E. Before marriage and for teens it is the best choice

Key Resources: CHMG, Abstinence, Unit 2
Just For The Health Of It, Unit 4, p. 68-70
Think, Choose, Act Healthy, p. 27-35
Teen Health, Course 3, p. 128

Holy sh[/i]t, you're right. This liberal curriculum will surely lead our children to believe that.... umm... Abstinence is the only 100% effective means of pregnancy and STD prevention.

Damn you liberals with your agenda! Damn you to hell!!!

And then, as if a section on abstinence wasn't enough, they have the unmitigated GALL to say THIS??

[i]XIII. Identify and Describe Methods of Pregnancy Prevention
A. Abstinence

How DARE they give abstinece top billing in methods of pregnancy prevention!? Don't they know there's a top secret Liberal Agenda to promote here??

Well, damn it Gbaji. You convinced me. I'm going to move to Washington just to protest.