What does shaming teens about sex -- or the abstinence only movement -- have to do with S-CHIP?
Well, if you want the Repuritan Party to care about sick kids enough to vote for S-CHIP, you have to bribe them with $28 more million -- "to a total of about $200 million a year" -- for abstinence-only courses.
It's a f*cking wonder that the puritanical Republicans manage to reproduce themselves. I really don't know how the f*ck they do it. Oh yeah, I remember. They do it in bathrooms.
Abstinence 1, S-Chip 0:
Abstinence-only courses, the only form of federally financed sex ed, teach that sexual activity outside of marriage is likely to cause psychological and physical harm.
If that were true, our health care system would be not only broken, but besieged. A 2002 survey found that 93 percent of American adults had had premarital sex by the age of 30.
In addition to provoking shame about a nearly universal activity, abstinence-only sex education is ineffective and dangerous. . . Programs in public schools teach patently false information like “the chances of getting pregnant with a condom are one out of six” and H.I.V. “may be in your body for a long time (from a few months to as long as 10 years or more) before it can be detected.”
The results are tragic. The United States has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the developed world (about the same as Ukraine’s), and the highest abortion rate in the Western world. Sexually transmitted infections like syphilis and gonorrhea are on the rise for the first time since the 1980s, and chlamydia is being diagnosed twice as often as it was a decade ago.
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