Posted on 12/29/2008 5:29:11 PM PST by Kaslin
Media: Major news organizations are just gloating about the latest study "proving" that abstinence education not only doesn't work but is dangerous. If protecting kids mattered to them, they would dig deeper.
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health on Monday released a study contending teens who make premarital abstinence vows are just as likely to engage in premarital sex as those who don't. Moreover, teens making and breaking the pledge are significantly less likely to use birth control, it says.
The Washington Post treated it like an epic revelation. "Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective, Study Finds," was the Post's headline, paired with this kicker: "Teenagers Who Make Such Promises Are Just as Likely to Have Sex, and Less Likely to Use Protection, the Data Indicate." Buried in the piece was Bloomberg School report author Janet Rosenbaum's revelatory remark that abstinence is effective when based on "individual conviction."
Turning to Bloomberg.com's coverage, the headline was "Virginity Pledges Fail to Trump Teen Lust in Look at Older Data." Curiously, the news organization founded by Bloomberg failed to note he also funded the school at Johns Hopkins that wrote the study.
A few months back, Johns Hopkins researchers reported that years after dropping the hallucinogenic fungi psilocybin in experiments, 61% of subjects said they felt it had made them more loving and sensitive. Maybe psilocybin trips can be incorporated in the next Johns Hopkins teen sex-ed study.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
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WOW...That’s one really bad headline pun!
Teens are teens. Thank you John Hopkins for proving it with tax-payer dollars. As a side note....MORALS....those unseen lessons, tend to take hold and drive the human mind long after hormones lesson their grip.
Oh, gad ~ who will rid us of these multi-billionaires?
Can we find a tax man?
Based on the quality of this article (and the outcome of the last election), it looks like we are a couple of generations too late on dispensing contraception.
...Bloomberg holds the record for the largest single donation to Johns Hopkins....I expect they’ll manufacture whatever research he tells them to.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/123/1/e110
It looks as though the article can be downloaded for free.
From the article: “Virginity pledges are also now used to measure AOSE program effectiveness, which the US government
considers successful if they produce many virginity pledgers, irrespective of participants’ sexual behavior.”
Is it true that the pledge is considered a marker for the success of abstinence-only sex ed? I know that I’ve read several articles showing short term increase in the intention to remain abstinent, so that would not surprise me. However, I haven’t seen this “marker.”
As far as I can tell, it appears that the author took data from a series of national questionnaires , matched kids for background and family, and found that they have similar outcomes after 5 years.
Oddly, a huge number of the pledgers denied having pledged. The other number that seems to stick out is that the non-pledgers did pay for sex and/or get paid for sex more often.
Nevertheless, the only study that I’ve seen that measured pregnancy rates after a course that included teaching proper condom use did not show prevention of pregnancy, either. http://www.lifeethics.org/www.lifeethics.org/2006/11/uk-teaching-children-how-to-use.html review of the pay-for-view article in the British Medical Journal article, http://www.bmj.com/cgi/rapidpdf/bmj.39014.503692.55v1.pdf
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