« An "Ethics Emergency" | Main | The WSJ Rips DeLay »
March 28, 2005
Scientists discover main risk factor leading to abortion!
In 2000 through 2001, 10,683 women obtaining abortions were surveyed about their reasons for having an abortion. Forty-six percent said that they had not been using contraceptives when they became pregnant, and thirty-seven percent said they had been using contraceptives, but not consistently.
Oooh, I can hear members of the Konservative Kristian Koalition (KKK) howling right now that abstinence works 100% of the time and that sex outside of marriage is the cause, and not the lack of contraceptives. Oh, yeah? What about the married women who sought abortions? Silly me, there I go, pointing out the division between science and religion.
Yes, well, let us take a few moments to meditate on the history of Church Teaching vs. Science.
Photograph by permission of the artist,
Linda Griffith (copyright protected)
Meanwhile,as we wait for the religious police to catch up with modern medicine, check out some of the findings of this new study.
Abstinence is 100% effective if 'used' with perfect consistency. But common sense suggests that in the real world, it can and does fail.
So, exactly what is the definition of abstinence? What sexual behaviors should be abstained from? A recent nationally representative survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Seventeen Magazine found that half of all 15-17-year-olds believed that a person who has oral sex is still a virgin. Even more striking, the APS study found that the majority (55%) of college students pledging virginity who said they had kept their vow reported having had oral sex. While the pledgers generally were somewhat less likely to have had vaginal sex than nonpledgers, they were equally likely to have had oral or anal sex. Because oral sex does not eliminate people's risk of HIV and other STDs, and because anal sex can heighten that risk, being technically abstinent may therefore still leave people vulnerable to disease.
So what's the answer? Comprehensive sex education, that's what. Not only does sex education address the need to protect the public health, it is also covered under the First Amendment. Let's safeguard the protection, safety, and well-being of the public while we uphold our freedom of speech! Now that's All American!
Photograph by permission of the artist,
Linda Griffith (copyright protected)
Posted by at March 28, 2005 08:53 PM | Permalink
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.houstondemocrats.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/75
Comments
Is anyone else hearing Ethel Merman singing, "I got rhythm..."?
Posted by: PDiddie at March 29, 2005 07:27 AM
Wow, here's the story you missed, Victoria ...
Reasons for having an abortion:
21% unready for responsibility
21% can't afford baby right now
16% concerned about how having baby would change her life
12% has problems with relationship or wants to avoid single parenthood
11% is too immature or young to have child
Now, the Guttmacher Institute does have more up-to-date studies, but the numbers on those don't change all that much.
Nowhere does any of this derive from the insistence that abstinence "fails" nor does it necessitate a moral equivalence of racism with people of faith (be they conservative, moderate or liberal). While I agree that a comprehensive sex education program ought to be part of one's education, I think there's nothing wrong with including abstinence as the lead on that score. Abstinence does work 100% of the time ... failure to abstain, and the mental invention of exceptions to abstinence, are not the same thing. That point ought to be emphasized, not downplayed.
Posted by: Greg Wythe at March 29, 2005 10:19 AM
Abstinence does indeed work 100% time, no matter how much one tries to deny it. Does that make it the whole solution? Not in a school full of hormonal teenagers. My daughter, a high school junior, is convinced her school is filled with teenage mothers because of the emphasis on abstinence.
What I find more interesting is to place the abortion problem side by side with the unwed mother problem. Unwed motherhood used to be a social shame to be avoided at all costs, especially in conservative and/or religious communities. In those same communities today, unwed mothers are welcomed as preferable to abortion. As a result today, we have religious communities overrun with "fatherless" children and unwed mothers, a highly destabilizing condition for society to find itself in. Is one better or worse than the other? I doubt it. Does anyone have a solution to this dilemma, short of a wholesale return to Victorian morality? I doubt it.
Posted by: Dale Napier at March 29, 2005 03:37 PM
Well,......I suppose that if anybody in America could be considered experts on abstinence, it's Greg Wythe and Dale Napier!
Posted by: Victoria at March 31, 2005 10:40 PM