Coburn’s crazy condemnation of condoms

July 25, 2006

It’s bad enough when religious right groups get federal grants from the Bush administration to tell teenagers that condoms are dangerous and won’t offer protection against pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. But when a doctor-turned-senator argues the same thing during a policy debate, you really have to shake your head.

During today’s Senate debate on S. 403, a bill on abortion parental notification laws, former physician and One Who Should Know Better, Sen. Tom Coburn, argued that by distributing condoms in schools, we were rationalizing risky behavior to teenagers.

“You know, the moral rationalization is if you make a mistake there’s no consequences. I’ve seen the consequences. Condoms and teenagers work about 50% of the time, if you count all the studies up,” said Coburn.

First, the “studies” Coburn summarizes actually show the opposite conclusion. The actual rate of condom effectiveness in pregnancy prevention is closer to 97%, not 50%.

Second, it’s disconcerting that the right’s anti-condom crusade refuses to fade away. As the Senate Majority Project noted, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and USAID have “removed or revised fact sheets on condoms, excising information about their effectiveness in disease prevention, and promoting abstinence instead.”

To borrow Coburn’s words, someone is rationalizing risky behavior, but I think it’s conservatives who make bogus claims about sexual health, not the reality-based community.

Boy, the Oklahoma Senate delegation is having a field day today, aren’t they?

  • I think Coburn is saying that teenagers are morons who can’t use condoms correctly more than 50% of the time. (Even the study you link makes the distinction between perfect use and typical use.) Which is all the more reason to teach teeagers how to use them in sex ed classes, in my view.

  • Not to worry. If mistakes should happen Coburn can always, assisted by Frist, perform an instant baby-ectomy (abortion) by muttering the prayer “abracadabra” at a videotape of the pregnant teenager.

  • It sounds like he might have been making a slightly different point– that teenagers frequently fail to use condoms correctly, and that therefore the rate of teenage pregnancy and STD transmission is substantially higher among condom-using teens than among the general condom-using population.

    The article cited by CB lends some support to this view. It does not say that the “actual rate of condom effectiveness in pregnancy prevention is closer to 97%.” It clearly states that that is the “perfect use” effectiveness rate. The article says that in actual use, “The estimated typical pregnancy rate among condom users in the US is about 14 per 100 women,” or 86% effectiveness. It doesn’t seem implausible that the effectiveness rate among inexperienced teenagers would be lower than the average actual use rate, though 50% seems hard to believe.

    Coburn may have been overstating his case by misrepresenting the statistics, but let’s not commit the same error in refuting him.

  • I think he counted up about 15 or so studies that showed 97% effectiveness, and added up the remainders of each. When a doctor does this kind of stuff, the AMA should revoke their license. If you told this to a patient, you’d be sued for malpractice.

  • The real point is that a doctor should be promoting effective and truthful sex education instead of insisting that teens simply not have sex. That is just not going to happen!

    Neocon retards like Coburn are jeopardizing the lives and health of the young people of this nation with their rigid and useless ideology.

    If they don’t want to have sex (or can’t find anyone willing to get close enough to make that possible), then fine and dandy.

    But don’t lie to the kids. They deserve better than that.

  • Can you pass “the banana test”?

    Practicing putting a condom on a banana can help teens (and others) use condoms correctly. I am sorry if I am graphic. But, removing the air from the tip of the condom by squeezing the end will allow the condom to function properly as it is rolled on (adults with experience know). Any questions?

  • The Dutch Model:

    With the lowest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe (8.4 per 1,000 girls between 15 and 19), any initiative in the Netherlands deserves attention. “There is no country that has invested so much in research into family planning…, media attention and improvement of service delivery than the Netherlands,” wrote experts from the Netherlands Institute of Social and Sexological Research (NISSO) in a specialised journal. Although the country has no mandatory national curriculum, nearly all secondary schools provide sex education as part of biology classes and over half the country’s primary schools address sexuality and contraception. According to H. Roling, a professor of education at the University of Amsterdam, “the Dutch government has always accepted the fact that education was better than denial,” and the subject has been tackled in schools since the 1970s.

    And:

    Health educators have long argued that sex education would effectively reduce the number of teenage pregnancies. Countries that do use progressive sex education at a young age, such as the Netherlands, tend to have a much lower rate of teenage pregnancy than the United States and the United Kingdom.

    And (my emphasis):

    […] the Netherlands has a low rate of births and abortions among teenagers.Compared to countries with higher teenage birth rates, the Dutch have a higher average age at first intercourse and increased levels of contraceptive use (including the “double Dutch” method of using both a contraceptive pill and a condom).

    So where’s the argument?

  • Sorry, can’t help beating this donkey:

    Each summer since in 1998, Advocates for Youth and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte sponsor annual study tours to France, Germany, and the Netherlands to explore why adolescent sexual health outcomes are so much more positive in the three European countries than in the U.S.

    Rights. Respect. Responsibility.® The study tour participants—policy makers, researchers, youth-serving professionals, foundation officers, and youth—have found that this trilogy of values underpins a social philosophy regarding adolescent sexual health in these countries. Each of these nations has an unwritten social contract with young people: “We’ll respect your right to act responsibly, giving you the tools you need to avoid unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, including HIV.”

    In these nations, societal openness and comfort in dealing with sexuality, including teen sexuality, and pragmatic governmental policies create greater, easier access to sexual health information and services for all people, including teens. Easy access to sexual health information and services leads to better sexual health outcomes for French, German, and Dutch teens when compared to U.S. teens.

  • Wow. These guys have no shame in trying to impress their base. How many lives have this administration and the far right wingers hurt with their ignorance?
    The party based on “values” make it clearer everyday that they have none themselves but want to force false values on the rest of us.

  • Goldie:

    So where’s the argument?

    Somewhere near of here:

    Big Government family planning bad…
    Local Christian orthodoxy good…

    Big Government family planning bad…
    Local Christian orthodoxy good…

    Big Government family planning bad…
    Local Christian orthodoxy good…

    Which is also to say:
    You cannot win an argument with a conservative.
    All the facts mean less than nothing to them…
    Even if you also had hauled in the data for STD rates in the USA compared to Europe & Canada
    (they are astounding and enlightening.)

    NO MATTER! NO MIND!

    Which is also to say:

    You can lead a conservative to the clear waters of reason but you cannot stop them from excreting in it…

  • RE: comment 4.

    I read some of the literature on this issue back in the “AIDS wars” days. At that time the number being floated around was 10% effectiveness, but the variance between demographic groups was huge. So it would not surprise me if the rate for the worst groups were much larger than 14%. But if the claim is that the effectiveness rate for educated middle-class white teenagers–the group whose parents the Republicans like to keep in perpetual fear–is 50% is beyond belief. But the alternate claim of 3% for the most at risk groups, say, for example, poverty stricken, poorly educated, Hispanic Catholic 14 year olds, is equally silly. Unfortunately this is an issue where both sides spin like crazy.

  • Coburn is a nutcase. He’s the one who campaigned by saying lesbianism is “so rampant in some of the schools…that they’ll let only one girl go to the bathroom.” According to him, “The gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country, and they wield extreme power… That agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today. Why do you think we see the rationalization for abortion and multiple sexual partners? That’s a gay agenda.”
    He’s said lots of wacko things. Apparently, being an MD is no impediment to such thinking.

  • “You know, the moral rationalization is if you make a mistake there’s no consequences.”

    It sounds more like he’s talking about the Republican fund raising, campaign, and redistricting strategies OR Congrsssional oversight of the Executive Branch – than condoms. As I said, Oklahoma is the wing-nuttiest state in the Union.

    Between Coburn and Frist I think we might have too many doctors in Congress and not enough lawyers.

  • ***You can lead a conservative to the clear waters of reason but you cannot stop them from excreting in it…***
    koreyel

    This may be so, but if the conservative is isolated, shunned, and rejected by the greater portion of society, then the conservative will find that it only has the self-soiled waters to make its Kool Aid with….

  • (Sorry for the graphical nature of this, don’t know a way to say it without saying it)
    I keep on imagining a sensible sex education policy here in America.
    a) it would include full information on all types of birth control
    b) it would include a complete illustraion of and discussion of non-procreative forms of sex, including masturbation, oral and anal sex, and gay sex
    c) it would have a STRONG ethical content, based on the following principles:
    1: the decision when or with whom to have sex would be left to the person him or her self and any decision in this area would be supported
    2: The basic ethical principles would start with respect (as an –unpublished– character of mine comments “If you fully realize that, when you have sex, there’s a PERSON on either end of your cock, you’ve understood 90% of sexual ethics)
    3: Next principle is responsibility, not just in the matter of pregnancy, but in fully understanding that actions have consequences and considering them before you act
    4: The final principles are consent and honesty (Lying to someone, pressuring them, getting them drunk, anything that lessens their consent is the ethical equivalent of using a date-rape drug – I was going to say “of rape” but the violent and dominaton aspects there are different)

    That would work, not in cutting down sexual activity — why would that be a good thing — but in cutting down disease, pregnancy, and various sexual psychological dysfunctions.

    Anybody want to guess how long it will take for this to be possible in America? (Actually, I will. About 10 years — but then I believe the ‘March towards Christianism” will self destruct over the next two years and we might start getting sane again.)

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