This diary has two related purposes, and I cannot tell even myself which one is more significant. One purpose is to make sure this community is aware of a new study recently released that shows how ridiculous Abstinence Only Education programs are in light of the following results from the study:
Results. Data from the 2002 survey indicate that by age 20, 77% of respondents
had had sex, 75% had had premarital sex, and 12% had married; by age
44, 95% of respondents (94% of women, 96% of men, and 97% of those who
had ever had sex) had had premarital sex. Even among those who abstained
until at least age 20, 81% had had premarital sex by age 44. Among cohorts
of women turning 15 between 1964 and 1993, at least 91% had had premarital
sex by age 30. Among those turning 15 between 1954 and 1963, 82% had had
premarital sex by age 30, and 88% had done so by age 44.
The second purpose of this diary is to tell those of you that missed it, that the Today Show did an extended piece on this report today, and they seemed to me to be in favor of the reports conclusions. Does this mean the conservatives are finally losing their grip on preventing the MSM from acting rationally toward human sexuality issues for a change?
The entire report by Lawrence Finer appears in Public Health Reports / January-February 2007. Here are the summary conclusions from this report:
Conclusions. Almost all Americans have sex before marrying. These findings
argue for education and interventions that provide the skills and information
people need to protect themselves from unintended pregnancy and sexually
transmitted diseases once they become sexually active, regardless of marital
status.
Kaiser Network’s Daily Women’s Health Policy also had a summary about the report. Here is the important part from this summary for health policy folks:
According to Finer, at least 91% of women born between 1950 and 1978 said they had premarital sex by age 30, and 88% of women born in the 1940s said they had premarital sex prior to age 44 (AP/Chicago Tribune, 12/19). Finer said the margin of error in the report is less than one percentage point (USA Today, 12/20). “The data clearly show that the majority of older teens and adults have already had sex before marriage, which calls into question the federal government’s funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs for 12- to 29-year-olds,” Finer said, adding, “It would be more effective to provide young people with the skills and information they need to be safe once they become sexually active — which nearly everyone eventually will.”
Now as to The Today Shows piece on this, here is a link to this interesting video from this day.
I worked in a State Health Department in the late 1990s when the conservatives for the millionth time began trying to hold back the tide of human sexuality again. I mean it brought the screwballs out of the woodwork. All the middle age mother types that normally would be rational folks, just would lose their rationality in favor of this approach. They would forget their own pasts in what seemed to be almost a form of censorship, and of course would seem to forget the extreme dangers posed by NOT really equipping young people properly to protect their very lives through proper sexual education for all. It seems we need to keep ignoring the obvious human nature finding from this study about every 25 years of so. The problem this time around was the conservatives got control of the federal government and the MSM (for a time anyway) and made this whitewashing of human instincts a sort of national policy.
Well hopefully studies like this along with the seemingly renewed rationality of the MSM will get national education policy on this sexual education issue back on a track that can logically and scientifically do some good for a change and stop diverting funds into pockets of misguided souls!
Even Kinsey’s report indicated that approximately HALF the women he interviewed admitted they had engaged in premarital sex. And that was before the widespread availability of the Pill, when everyone knew “good” girls kept themselves pure unti marriage…. right?
Yep, abstinence works really well… Hah!
This study only confirms what everyone with even a half a brain cell seems to know-that one way or another many many people have sex before marriage. And conversely of course what all idiot conservatives refuse to believe and acknowledge is that the more something is put off limits especially to young people the more they are going to go out and try it.(again and again no doubt).
As long as we have way to many fundamentalists in office this Ship of Fools on the Abstinence Express will keep chugging along. After reading just last week about another 50 million or so allotted to ‘preaching’ abstinence to people between 20 and 30 this Ship will keep tugging along wasting taxpayer money.
One has to wonder just how much acting as a hypocrite is a fairly widespread human parental trait! I do believe the numbers in this study, and yet the many folks, mostly women parents, that I worked with seemed to have an overwhelming urge to support this Abstinence only crap. Women that on the surface in other areas maybe were not liberals but moderates anyway, would jump on this bandwagon as if was the equivalent to turning straw into gold or some remedy to save the world! How could they so easily forget their own young and urges, especially with the real dangers of fatal STDs out there. Thus I say that many parents tend to be hypocrites and want to censor from their offspring the very materials needed to grow up healthy in the REAL world.
Why are so many people (parents) like that????
You’re right as to how adults seem to mysterious forget or maybe not just what their thoughts and hormones were doing during their teenage years. And I’ve never understood the theory postulated by fundies that if you give teens all the info on sex education they therefore will go out and have sex…as if trying to deny sexuality of teens with abstinence somehow will make them less prone to having sex. Other studies seem to show that comprehensive sex education actually will promote either abstinence or at least safe sex and less pregnancies which is really what should be a major goal of sex ed as far as I’m concerned.