Spending our Tax dollars on Abstinence-only websites?

Yes, my dear reader, our federal government is spending our tax dollars on government websites that promote abstinence-only when it comes to the sexuality of our youth.

Last time I checked that isn’t a government function, indoctrinating individuals to abstain from sex prior to “marriage”. But here it is in all it’s ahem..glory. The first words on this site are:

You can help your son or daughter make healthy choices, including deciding to wait until marriage to have sex. 4parents.gov can help you talk to your child, pre-teen, or teen early and often about waiting to have sex, what happens as he or she grows, and other important topics.

This website is divided into three main parts. Each area will help you as a parent to talk with your pre-teen or teen to come up with ways to handle lots of situations:

Talking to Your Pre-Teen or Teen About Waiting
How to talk. Answers to tough questions. Skills your son or daughter needs. Healthy relationships.

Sex and Risky Youth Behaviors
Risks of teen sex. Birth Control. Alcohol, drugs, tobacco, and violence.

Sexual Development and Reproduction
Puberty. Sexual Development. Pregnancy.

The website states that it provides parents with “information” to help them talk to their children about pre-marital sex, or more correctly, how to make them abstain from pre-marital sex. The problem is, as ThinkProgress points out, the information isn’t grounded in science. Also, and more importantly in my humble opinion, abstinence-only programs have had “no impacts on rates of sexual abstinence” as this report commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services points out in its Executive Summary:

Findings indicate that youth in the program group were no more likely than control group youth to have abstained from sex and, among those who reported having had sex, they had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same mean age. Contrary to concerns raised by some critics of the Title V, Section 510 abstinence funding, however, program group youth were no more likely to have engaged in unprotected sex than control group youth.

So, we, by our tax dollars, are not only funding this website, we are allowing our federal government to hand out inaccurate, misleading or totally false information on things such as pregnancy, birth control, abortion and this one really drives me up a wall..the amount of drugs or alcohol that women who have had abortions consume. From the government website:

Abortions can have complications. There may be emotional consequences, as well: some women say that they feel sad and some use more alcohol or drugs than before.

What kind of crap is that I ask you? Seriously..is that batshit grounded in science? They reference a study, but do not provide a hyperlink to the study…interesting no? They give vague information that, as the actual study shows, is total bullshit:

[T]he APA [American Psychological Association] found that “women who are terminating pregnancies that are wanted or who lack support from their partner or parents for the abortion may feel a greater sense of loss, anxiety and distress. For most women, however, the time of greatest distress is likely to be before an abortion; after an abortion, women frequently report feeling ‘relief and happiness.’”

They take the words of the study out of context and generalize findings. Another website that specializes in youth and sexuality among other things has this to say about the governments dabbling in our private lives and our morals by publishing erroneous information on the government website in question and through various worthless educational programs in our school’s curriculum:

“After 10 years and $1.5 billion in public funds these failed abstinence-only-until-marriage programs will go down as an ideological boondoggle of historic proportions,” said James Wagoner, President of Advocates for Youth.

“The tragedy is not simply the waste of taxpayer dollars, it is the damage done to the young people who have been on the receiving end of distorted, inaccurate information about condoms and birth control. We have been promoting ignorance in the era of AIDS, and that’s not just bad public health policy, its bad ethics”.

How many times do we, as a Nation, have to be given misleading and outright false information by our government that allows them to control our lives through fear mongering? Why does the government think they NEED to tell us how to live our lives and raise our children? Its all Theocratic bs spoon-fed to us in the guise of providing us with ‘information’ that will make our lives better. I am sure that teen sex is an important issue; I frankly never doubted it was, but education about birth-control and the accurate consequences of unprotected sex will at least equip our children with the tools that they need to make an informed decision. We surely are promoting ignorance if we allow our FEDERAL GOVERNMENT to keep sites like 4parents.gov up and running with the information it currently contains. It’s not the government’s job to tell individuals how to feel either before or after an abortion, it’s especially not our government’s job to provide erroneous information about how women might or might not feel after such a procedure.

As this ThinkProgress write-up states, and I completely agree with; When the site launched in 2005, it told parents “to convince their teens to stop having sex by telling their children that they are ‘worth it.’” But no resources were provided for “parents whose teen remains sexually active, implying that these youth are not ‘worth it.’

In 2005, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) sent a letter to HHS with reviews by scientific experts who concluded that 4parents.gov’s content appeared “to have been guided by ideology.” He also noted that the website was not created by government scientists, as the administration claimed, “but rather through a no-bid contract to the National Physician’s Center for Family Resources, an obscure organization that has taken positions against scientific agencies on important matters of public health.”

Human Sexuality is an important issue. Youth sexuality is an extremely important issue my dear reader. But providing our parents and their children with lies and innuendo that is based in religious dogma and not scientific fact is wrong on every level. Spending our hard earned tax dollars on this endeavor is pure, unadulterated fuckwittery..plain and simple.

Crossposted at TheBlueRepublic

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