Comment & Debate
Fletcher Doyle. “The case for abstinence”. Buffalo News. 31 Mar. 2008 – Abstinence also has been blamed for the huge increase in sexually transmitted diseases among the young. However, if condoms are supposed to make sex safe and we have seen a large increase in condom usage among the young, then we would expect to see a drop in STDs. This clearly has not happened.
Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. “The Failure of Sex Education”. The Atlantic. Oct. 1994 – “Comprehensive sex education,” mandated in seventeen states, is the educational fad of the hour, yet there is little evidence that it “works”–prevents teenage pregnancy and stanches the spread of sexually transmitted disease. Defended by its professional-class originators as “getting real” about teenage sex, it fails to speak to the grim reality of what the author calls “the new sexual revolution” among the young.
[…] if comprehensive sex education has had a significant impact on teenage sexual behavior in New Jersey, there is little evidence to show it. The advocates cannot point to any evaluative studies of comprehensive sex education in the state. Absent such specific measures, one can only fall back on gross measures like the glum statistics on unwed teenage childbearing in the state. In 1980, 67.6 percent of teenage births were to unmarried mothers; eleven years later the figure had increased to 84 percent. Arguably, the percentage might be even higher if comprehensive sex education did not exist. Nevertheless, it is hard for advocates to claim that the state with the nation’s fourth highest percentage of unwed teenage births is a showcase for their approach.