Sexual Abstinence

The entire concept of “Abstinence” education is based on false dichotomy by the conservative right to assert a religious ideal on sex education with government money funneled out of existing entities such as Planned Parenthood. The reality is that abstinence education is using misdirected transitive logic to legitimize its existence over traditional sex education classes. According to Judith Levine’s essay “No-Sex Education”, the Guttmacher Institute suggested that the teen sex was the cause for poverty, teen pregnancy, unwed motherhood, and abortion (pg. 99). These issues led into what the institute called “the problem of premarital adolescent sexual relations”. So by placing the variables in order you have the following:

Variable A= Teen sex.
Variable B= Social problems.
Variable C= “The problem”.

Therefore A=B, B=C, which would suggest A=C. But, this is confusing the association of teen sex and social problems as causations. The reality is that A+B=C. This is in part due to government mandates restricting birth control to low income families, which in part has led to higher teen pregnancies. Religious based sex education curriculum has only exacerbated “the problem” of teen pregnancy by not informing youth of their biological reproductive system. Abstinence education has no forum to suggest it as a exclusive tool for reducing the teen pregnancy epidemic. Therefore “Abstinence” should only be relegated to supplemental options for sex education with the main focus strictly being biological education. Without strict guidelines to relegate this thinking, similar behavior will continue to run relavent.

Citation
Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2002. [continues]

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