0802 Abstinence Only
There are times when it is positively difficult being the specially created creature called man. Youthful sexuality is one of those challenges. How adults train youth to manage their sexuality affects individuals as well as the whole of society.
This past December a writer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune wonderfully summarized contemporary arguments against maintaining a high standard for training our kids to manage sexual behavior. In a piece captioned “Just Say No to Abstinence Only.” he demonstrated evolution’s “higher-order primate” morality.
The article’s logic is persuasive if we and our children are complex products of omnipotent biology and unfathomable physics. Given such a scenario it would indeed be “unrealistic” and harmful to force the younger of our species, to hold the line against reproductive drives. With only natural processes as our guide, money, science, public opinion and “real[ism]” can be the only wisdom. If all the elements fall into place the way is clear.
But the way is not clear under such a philosophical theology. Those elements do not fall into place and they are not what some claim them to be.
Children are more than a crowning evolutionary achievement. They are spiritual and moral beings with the ability to learn, experience conviction and keep commitments. Sexual abstinence, the ability to regulate impulses and deny self-gratification, may begin in the head but it takes root through the will and is anchored in the heart. When authority figures refuse to demand purity, youthful convictions seek easier commitments, hearts weaken and lives are wounded.
If it seems presumptuous to plead the case for abstinence-only education based on a spiritual/moral understanding of youth, there is more. Studies consistently demonstrate that the strongest factors in responsible sexual behavior for young people are family connectedness, parental disapproval of illicit sexual behavior, parental disapproval of contraceptive use, virginity pledging and religion and prayer.
Scientific research strongly supports abstinence only education and virginity pledge programs. Using the same data from one of the most cited anti-abstinence studies (Journal of Adolescent Health) and proper statistical methods, Rector and Johnson found pledgers and abstinence graduates far more likely to save sex for marriage and were far less likely to contract sexually transmitted diseases. For just one example, by age 25, virginity pledgers were forty percent more likely to have remained pure and from fifteen to thirty percent more likely to be STD clear.
Abstinence-only programs have accomplished those results while being ham-strung financially. Even though the federal government spends over ten times more on other approaches and most abstinence programs amount to only ten to fifteen hours per year of involvement, results last into adulthood. On the other hand, “comprehensive” programs have given us exploding teen pregnancy rates and epidemic STD rates.
Anti-abstinence forces would also have us believe that public opinion cries out for more sexually explicit youth training as well as contraceptive competence. Not true. The best most recent polls show ninety percent of parents want their children taught abstinence. Not only that, the difference between abstinence only and comprehensive graduates in contraceptive knowledge is negligible.
In the final analysis, as the Tribune article accidentally noticed, the battle for our children’s sexual well-being is a matter of realism. Any human being, let alone one experiencing the pressures of adolescence in American culture, if given the impression that they can safely live on the edge, will. Reality says that if kids are given the means and expectation to remain sexually pure, the majority of them will. Reality dictates that if a person has the tools to abstain from pre-marital sex, the probability at any age of contracting STDs or getting pregnant will be zero.