Surprise! Surprise! Telling Kids the Truth About Sex Actually Works!

By Stefano Gennarini, J.D. | June 22, 2016

Just earlier this month, Valerie Huber, President of Ascend, a group on the conservative side of sex education in America arguing for Sexual Risk Avoidance (SRA) approaches, wrote a fascinating piece in Public Discourse on the sad state of affairs the Obama administration has introduced into Federal sex education programming.

Huber exposes the notion of “evidence-based comprehensive sex education”, so in vogue among national and international bureaucrats, as a pretext of the Obama administration to fund only groups that promote avant-garde sexual mores that are actually more likely to harm children.

There is evidence that programs pre-approved by HHS for Federal funding, and with the strongest possible “evidentiary” backing, are actually encouraging sexual risk taking among children and exposing them to STD infection, as well as other psychological and emotional health issues.

Huber wrote that communities are being “mislead” by shoddy and disingenuous research.

There is no evidence that communities that implement programs on the HHS “evidence-based list” can actually expect their students to decrease their sexual risk. The threshold for inclusion is just too low. In fact, there is some evidence that the implementation of some programs on the list may actually expose students to additional risk. This list should not be used to give credibility to the claim that so-called “comprehensive” sex education works and SRA education doesn’t. Too many research protocols have been ignored to make such careless claims.

It turns out the evidence is on the side of abstinence education, also known as SRA. CDC data shows that abstinence education really works. Here is what Huber wrote earlier this week on LifeNews.com:

On June 9, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the new 2015 data from the most recent Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which updates what we know about youth and their engagement in health risk behaviors.

The results show that fewer teens are drinking than before, less are involved in physical fighting, and teen smoking hit its lowest level since the government began tracking it in 1991.

But the big news is the dramatic increase in the percentage of teens who have never had sex. Since 1991 (the first year the CDC began tracking youth risk behaviors), the percent of high school students who have never had sex has increased 28 percent. In real numbers, that means that nearly 6 in 10 teens are making the healthiest choice by waiting for sex—the highest percent to date.

According to Huber, the results are directly correlated to Sexual Risk Avoidance messaging in sex education, something social conservatives have fought hard for in recent decades:

We are seeing an encouraging trend that has been sustained for more than two decades. More teens in every high school grade are waiting for sex in greater numbers than ever before. Overall, almost 60 percent of all teens have not had sex. The majority of high schoolers are waiting until their senior year to experiment sexually—a time when most schools don’t have any education to reinforce the healthiest choice to wait. Even so, many more high school seniors are waiting than they were two decades ago.

The data is clear. It confirms that Sexual Risk Avoidance is realistic and that it resonates with teens. It also tells us that we need to be more intentional with the messages we send to teens—and the importance of giving teens the skills to graduate high school without any of the negative consequences that can surround teen sex. Today, those messages normalize sex, especially for older students. This must change.

Huber is also right on this account. According to the CDC one out of every three persons living in the United States is infected with and STD at any given time. 20 million new STD infections occur each year, 10 million among those aged 15-24.

This misinformation about sex being sown among adolescents in the United States and beyond by Planned Parenthood, SEICUS, HHS, and their ilk may just be a huge class action lawsuit waiting to happen, maybe an international one.

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