Health Stuff

If you don’t already know, we’re starting the Sex and Abstinence unit in Health. Today we had a speaker from the Pregnancy Care Center come in. She was quite amusing, but I’ll get to that later. First I’d like to note some of the problems with the unit itself. I love how they grouped sex and abstinence together. It is quite a good method for getting support for their program. What parent will say, “I don’t want you teaching my teen to not have sex?” Now to the speaker. I’ll acknowledge that a lot of what the speaker said is true. But she exaggerated some of the stuff. First, she told us the one-forth of sexually active teens has an STD. Then she gave us a die and told us that rolling it was like having sex. However, all six sides gave you a problem. If you follow the one-in-four statistic, one and a half sides of the die should have been an STD. The other four and a half should have been nothing. Sex, believe it or not, does NOT always lead to problems. It does a lot, but not always. A little off topic, I find it very annoying when a speaker says something like, “Every eight seconds, somebody dies from tobacco use.” That just isn’t true. What they should say is “Over the last XX years, YYYYY people have died from tobacco use. That averages to one person every Z seconds.” Okay, back to the Health presentation. We watched a video which was basically a bunch of teens saying “Sex is bad until marriage!” Which is a matter of opinion, but whatever. They said that condoms fail 2-4% of the time, which actually isn’t a very high failure rate. But only one-third of teens who use condoms do it properly.^# So if the condoms still manage to protect in 98-96% of the times when they’re used WRONG, then they do far better than anything else out there. For example, if you use a car incorrectly (ex. drive it into a tree) then you’re dead. The video also told us that abstinence is 100% effective for preventing STDs. This isn’t true. STDs can be transmitted by blood as well as by sex. Some can even be transmitted by skin contact. NOTHING is 100% effective. Another issue is this: they’re telling us that condoms do not work, so people who are going to have sex might decide to NOT use a condom. Then they might actually get an STD. Condoms are not as good as actually abstaining from sex (they don’t prevent against HPV*), but they’re a lot easier to use than abstinence is. Having sex is a basic instinct of the human body, and a strong one. People are more likely to use a condom during sex (if that’s what they are taught) than to just not have sex. Studies back me up on this: “Despite the US federal government's 20-year support for abstinence-only-until-marriage programmes for American adolescents, there is no peer-reviewed research proving that these have had a positive impact on behaviour.”¹ The speaker also talked about there only being two STDs in the sixties. This isn’t true. You could still get the other diseases, but they were less common and unknown. There’s probably some other stuff that I should tell you, but I can’t remember any of it right now, so comment and tell me. The second website in my resources has a lot of statistics, but I don’t feel like pouring through it. If somebody finds something relevant, comment.

References:
¹http://www.eldis.org/hivaids/abstinence.htm
²http://www.aafp.org/afp/20041015/1517.html
³http://www.medinstitute.org/media/hpv_pr.htm

*“Dr. Richard Klausner of the National Cancer Institute has stated, ‘Condoms are ineffective against HPV because the virus is prevalent not only in mucosal tissue, but also on dry skin of the surrounding abdomen and groin, and can migrate from those areas into the vagina and cervix.’”^3
#Don’t quote me on this, I’m going from memory.

PS: The funny part about the speaker is that she had this weird voice and really bad grammar. She sounded like Yeager, but worse!