Abstinence is not the answer

The honeymoon is over. Suddenly, political pundits and everyday workingmen have become disillusioned with the promises made by our president.

Since his induction into office in January, very little has been accomplished by the first black leader of this great nation. But, it is not from lack of trying on his part – he has not even been in office for a year yet and has continually had a full table of issues to deal with – but a culture that demands everything immediately is less than forgiving.

But while President Obama’s vision of a complete overhaul in health care is currently stagnate, it is comforting to know other campaign efforts are still being made successful. Yes, health-care reform is still a ways off for America, but in the meantime, other areas of concern that suffered under the Bush administration have seen nothing but optimism in the wake of Obama.

In an education policy that reeked of evangelical undertones, former President George W. Bush advocated abstinence to teens. The poor education that ensued caused a major increase in the rates of teenage pregnancies, syphilis and AIDS.

“The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention says years of falling rates of teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease infections under previous administrations were reversed or stalled in the Bush years,” according to the Guardian, a liberal British newspaper. In somewhat of a microcosm, the places that get hardest by this troublesome trend are in the South, where the region’s focus on God and abstinence has become the ideal area for this decline in the progress of sexual health in our youth.

Even if Obama might be having a hard time putting through new legislation, there should be little opposition to overhauling sex education.

While it is something that might seem pale in comparison to the goliaths of Iraq and health care, that is no reason it should be ignored. And it hasn’t been. In May, Obama’s budget cut funding to abstinence-only sex education and moved it instead to other programs that actually reduce teenage pregnancies.  

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that teenage pregnancies have been on the decline since 1991; however, from 2005 to 2007, when the Bush administration preached its abstinince-only education, that rate began to rise sharply. On the sexually transmitted disease front, the number of teenage girls with syphilis has begun to increase. For the past two decades, there had been a steady decline in gonorrhea, but the study has shown that is being reversed. What is probably the most troubling statistic coming out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is that AIDS in adolescent boys has nearly doubled.

This is an opportunity for Obama to do right by his campaign promises and usher in a regime that is based on rationality and science instead of fear and ignorance. No, better sex education will not fix the economy or bring the soldiers safely home from the Middle East, but it deserves covering nonetheless. With the increase in teenage pregnancy and the rise of sexually transmitted diseases comes the destabilization of the family unit.

So, while Obama might not be doing everything perfect, it is comforting to know that where effective action can be taken, he has done so.