blog 10

Bradley, Sarah. "Abstinence Only: The Policy That Will Increase Teen Pregnancy." The Reporter. Winter 2003: 16-21. SIRS Researcher. Web. 13 Oct 2010.

http://sks.sirs.com/cgi-bin/hst-article-display?id=SIL0364-0-5463&artno=0000170778&type=ART&shfilter=U&key=Abstinence%20programs&title=Abstinence%20Only%3A%20The%20Policy%20That%20Will%20Increase%20Teen%20Pregnancy&res=Y&ren=N&gov=N&lnk=N&ic=N#citation


    "But the Bush administration doesn't see things that clearly, and is instead taking public health advice from right-wing religious conservative organizations who believe that the best approach to "solving the problem" of teen pregnancy and STI transmission is abstinence-only-until-marriage (commonly referred to as abstinence-only) education, a program which teaches abstinence from all sexual activity as the ONLY acceptable option for unmarried people, which uses messages of fear and shame to portray premarital sexual activity as inevitably harmful, and which discusses contraceptives only in terms of (often highly exaggerated and inaccurate) failure rates."
I found this fact very shocking: "There is an even greater need for this education among our children: four out of every five teen pregnancies are unintended.² Every year, one million American teenagers will become pregnant. The vast majority of these pregnancies will be unintended because teens too often didn't know how to use contraceptives properly."

"Many abstinence-only programs rely on messages of fear and shame to keep students from engaging in sexual activity. There is, however, no evidence that young people respond to these messages of shame or that they motivate teens to abstain from sexual intercourse."