It was bad enough to learn that Bush is boosting federal funding for abstinence-only programs that don’t work, but it’s so much worse that the programs getting our tax dollars are giving students outrageously incorrect information.
Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person’s genitals “can result in pregnancy,” a congressional staff analysis has found.
Those and other assertions are examples of the “false, misleading, or distorted information” in the programs’ teaching materials, said the analysis, released yesterday, which reviewed the curricula of more than a dozen projects aimed at preventing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease.
Don’t forget: Bush insists that you pay for this.
We know from several objective studies that abstinence-only programs have little effect on sexual behavior, but in Bush’s America, ideologues have to take this one step further and share medically inaccurate information with young people. It’s not about giving young people information they need to stay healthy; it’s about advancing a right-wing agenda with our tax dollars with information that’s obviously false.
Consider some of these gems from publicly-funded curricula:
* A 43-day-old fetus is a “thinking person.”
* HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, can be spread via sweat and tears.
* Condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission as often as 31 percent of the time in heterosexual intercourse. (In reality, when used properly and consistently, condoms fail to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases less than 3 percent of the time.)
* One curriculum, called “Me, My World, My Future,” teaches that women who have an abortion “are more prone to suicide” and that as many as 10 percent of them become sterile. This contradicts the 2001 edition of a standard obstetrics textbook that says fertility is not affected by elective abortion, the Waxman report said.
The irreplaceable Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) summed this up nicely.
“I have no objection talking about abstinence as a surefire way to prevent unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases,” Waxman said. “I don’t think we ought to lie to our children about science. Something is seriously wrong when federal tax dollars are being used to mislead kids about basic health facts.”
It’s also worth noting that this isn’t some isolated problem with junk science being taught in a few Bible Belt states.
Several million children ages 9 to 18 have participated in the more than 100 federal abstinence programs since the efforts began in 1999. Waxman’s staff reviewed the 13 most commonly used curricula — those used by at least five programs apiece.
The report concluded that two of the curricula were accurate but the 11 others, used by 69 organizations in 25 states, contain unproved claims, subjective conclusions or outright falsehoods regarding reproductive health, gender traits and when life begins.
And as long as we’re on the subject, I should also mention that there’s a safer, more honest, more reliable, and more effective way to approach sexual health. In fact, as the Wall Street Journal’s Al Hunt noted today, in the early ’90s, the government embraced a comprehensive approach to the teen-pregnancy problem, which included more and earlier safe-sex education and better distribution of contraceptives.
The irony is, the right-wing/Bush method leads to promiscuous young people whose publicly-financed, state-endorsed ignorance puts their sexual health at greater risk. In Bush’s America, of course, what works isn’t nearly as important as what makes the GOP base happy.