A is for abstinence-only. Abstinence, too, can make the heart grow fonder. Abstinence-only sex education can make the heart grow heavier, more oppressed, more ignorant and more threatened.
Toward the end of last year, Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn) and Sen. Sam Brownbeck (R-Kan) traveled to Nairobi, Kenya. They were on a mission to ensure that any family planning agency that received US government dollars was teaching abstinence only to single people or the agency risked the loss of funding.
Over 40,000 children live on the streets of Nairobi. Their parents have died from AIDS or there parents can no longer afford to care for them. Average ages are eight to fourteen. Nearly 16,000 are girls. For protection and food, many of the girls opt to join a boys'street gang. Often the initiation rite to join is gang rape.
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There are few orphanages. One family living in the poorest slum of Nairobi started one. You literally have to drive over a garbage dump to get to the ramshackle tin shacks that comprise the orphanage. There are days when there is not enough food. Children from all over the slum gather with the orphans to wait for a volunteer teacher. Sometimes as many as three hundred children wait. Sometimes the teacher doesn't come.
The Senators probably stayed in an upscale hotel. Perhaps they even went on a few game drives...they were in Kenya after all. I'm relatively certain that they did not talk to any of the children who live on the streets. Had they, would they have talked about abstinence to the little girls who go through gang rape in order to survive?
AIDS and a population that it cannot support overwhelm Kenya, a beautiful country of many good people. The fraudulent, moral high ground of the neocons is not appropriate in Kenya or in any other developing country ... or in this country.
Scott Frank, a physician who heads the public health program at Case Western Reserve University, reviewed abstinence-only sex education information taught in Ohio's schools. He released a report this week.
One abstinence-only program warns that "teens who have sex before marriage should be 'prepared to die.'" Another program "compares condoms to a game of Russian Roulette," implying that not only is there a high failure rate, but that condom use can also lead to death."
According to the Toledo Blade, Dr. Frank said, "I found myself shaking my head and wondering, 'What decade are we living in?'"
Also according to the Blade, 42 percent of Ohio high school students have had intercourse. And, of those, 40 percent said that they did not use condoms the last time they had sex.
Bush and the neocons support abstinence-only education. Twenty-five states will receive $170 million to teach abstinence-only sex education.
And, just to keep this philosophy spreading throughout the world ... a department in USAID that works in family planning has been duplicated in the State Department. Political appointees fill the State Department group. Though the State Department personnel are not technocrats and have to rely on the USAID department to tell them what to do, the State Department personnel stay on message, "abstinence only." Anyone traveling to an international conference is vetted to ensure that the speaker stays on message.
A is for abstinence-only, a Scarlet Letter for the neocons. Shame.