Tuesday, February 02, 2010

When does abstinence education = comprehensive sex ed

When delusional pro-choicers like Robin Marty can't deal with the reality that one type of abstinence education might work better at delaying sexual activity than a type of comprehensive sex ed.

After quoting the Washington Post article on the story, Marty deceptively describes the study like this:
A class that says you should wait to have sex, and that a condom might be a good thing to use? Call me crazy, but that sounds like a sex ed class to me.
Ummm..... when did the article ever say the study said condoms were a good thing to use?

Oh, right.... it didn't. It just said the study didn't disparage condom use. It didn't say anything about telling kids that condoms were a good thing to use.

This is one to remember when pro-choicers act like they're objective pragmatists who really care about what science teaches us about how to delay teenage sexual activity.

Marty's delusions continue:
Reasonable parties have always wanted to teach a comprehensive approach that tells teens that you should wait to have sex, but if you don't, you need to protect yourself and your partner from pregnancy and disease, especially via the use of condoms.

This latest study totally supports those findings.


Ummm... no they don't. They showed that kids which received the comprehensive sex ed class were more likely to engage in sex than children who received the abstinence-only class.
Over the next two years, about 33 percent of the students who went through the abstinence program started having sex, compared with about 52 percent who were taught only safe sex. About 42 percent of the students who went through the comprehensive program started having sex, and about 47 percent of those who learned about other ways to be healthy did.

4 comments:

  1. How big was the study? How many kids did they look at?

    I smell statistical noise....

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  2. OC,
    If you took the time to read the Post article which explains the study and is linked above before commenting, you'd know that the involves 662 students.

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  3. JJ, maybe you can help me; there's something I haven't been able to find out.

    How did the study control for the fact that students in an abstinence-only class would be less likely to REPORT their sexual activity?

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  4. I don't know if they did or not.

    Here's the abstract.

    I'm not sure how you would (with the exception of anonymous questionnaires) control the likelihood that any of the groups would be untruthful about their sexual activities.

    If anonymous questionnaires aren't good enough for you, then I guess you also have no faith in any kind of teen sex study (including ones that might show the success of sex-ed curriculum) or any anonymous questionnaire study for that matter.

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