Imagine That!

From the "And Water Is Believed To Quench Thirst" File:
Comprehensive sex education may help reduce teen pregnancies without increasing levels of sexual intercourse or sexually transmitted diseases.

So find U.S. researchers who reviewed data from a 2002 national survey of more than 1,700 heterosexual teens, ages 15 to 19. Whoda thunk?

Of course, the article then goes on to play the "some say" game: There is ongoing debate about whether abstinence-only education or comprehensive sex education (including instruction in birth control) is best for students. Let's be clear. There's never been ANY such debate among health educators or serious scientists. What there's been is a lot of propaganda (financed, thanks to the Bush junta with our tax dollars, because it's "faith-based") thrown around by people who hate sex, hate women, and want to create their own little version of Gilead. The sorrow and the pity is that these godbotherers have been allowed to ruin lives with their faith-based bullshit when data-based research, not to mention common fucking sense, clearly indicate that teaching teens how to prevent pregnancy will -- surprise! -- prevent teen pregnancy. (Which, one imagines, likely prevents -- surprise, again! -- abortion. Something to consider when the xianists try to convince you that they really do want to prevent abortions. When what people do and what they say don't match, I find it's best to rely upon what they do. Just saying.)

Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that teens who received comprehensive sex education were 60 percent less likely to get pregnant or to get someone pregnant than those who received no sex education.

Other results -- not statistically significant, however -- suggested that comprehensive sex education, but not abstinence-based sex education, slightly reduced the likelihood of teens having vaginal intercourse. Neither approach seemed to reduce the likelihood of reported cases of sexually transmitted diseases.

The findings, published in the April issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, support comprehensive sex education, Kohler concluded.

"There was no evidence to suggest that abstinence-only education decreased the likelihood of ever having sex or getting pregnant," she said in a prepared statement.

This study offers "further compelling evidence" about the value of comprehensive sex education and the "ineffectiveness" of the abstinence-only approach, said Don Operario, a sex education expert and professor at Oxford University in England.

Not that anything will ever convince the fundie whackjobs, but could the rest of us please not grant these slobbering fools any more control over our education system?