Sex Education Failure
“My patients were hurting, they looked to me and what could I do?” So confesses an anonymous campus physician in the beginning of her startling memoir. Over the course of 200 pages, she tells story after story about suffering young women. If these women were ailing from eating disorders, or substance abuse, or almost any other medical or psychological problem, their university health departments would spring to their aid. “Cardiologists hound patients about fatty diets and insufficient exercise. Pediatricians encourage healthy snacks, helmets and discussion of drugs and alcohol. Everyone condemns smoking and tanning beds.”Unfortunately, the young women described in “Unprotected” have fallen victim to one of the few personal troubles that our caring professions refuse to treat or even acknowledge: They have been made miserable by their “sexual choices.” And on that subject, few modern doctors dare express a word of judgment.
I have a lot of sympathy for critics of abstinence education who say that it is more important that people be accurately informed than be presented with a moral treatise. That does apply to the dangers of sex though, especially unprotected sex, as much as anything else. The article brings up some really interesting points.
(via Broken Quanta, who focuses on just a single phrase in the article)
) hammering at my door I guess that we did.
I think the shortest summary of the thinking behind the abstinence programme is “ignorance is bliss”.
Do I have a solution to the problem of teenage pregnancies? Short of compulsory chastity belts, no not really. But effective relationship education of children by their parents has to be a starting point. Given that there are some in NZ who believe that teaching responsibility for drinking alchohol is to buy their kids as much as they want (to excess even) I am not holding my breath.