Sexual ignorance is an American tragedy

[David Wiley, a professor of health education at Texas State University, ] was discussing [human papillomavirus] with his students — the different types of HPV, the connection between HPV and cervical cancer, and its prevalence; “you know, just an intro, lower-level course,” he recently recalled — when a male student raised his hand with an earnest question: What was his risk of contracting cervical cancer?

“And I don’t know what’s sadder,” Wiley told The Intercept, “that he asked that question or that really nobody in the classroom even laughed because they didn’t know either.”

The question wasn’t terribly surprising to Wiley, who has been teaching and researching health education — including sex education — for nearly four decades. Many of the students who’ve come through his classes over the years have been woefully uninformed about the workings of their own bodies, he says. But Wiley doesn’t blame the students — after all, “if you never teach people math, how are they going to learn calculus? So, that’s part of our problem: You get exactly what you pay for.”

And in Texas — along with a majority of other states — when it comes to sex education, that means sinking millions into programs that preach to students the virtues of abstinence until marriage while foregoing actual education on sexuality and reproductive health, including the use of contraceptives (aside from emphasizing their failure rates), the prevention of STDs, and the importance of consent.

The federal government began funding so-called Abstinence-Only Until Marriage programs in 1981 as a way to encourage “chastity” and “self-discipline.” Since then, the feds have poured more than $2 billion into this strategy — commonly known as “ab-only” — without any proven positive effects.

[...]

Texas was an eager adopter of the abstinence-only approach, which expanded in 1996 and continued rapid growth during the George W. Bush administration, and has spent more than any other state on ab-only programs. Yet the state has also consistently had among the highest rates of teen pregnancy — it’s currently fifth in the nation; Arkansas is No. 1 — and maintains a stranglehold on the top spot for the number of repeat births to teens (at 24 percent).

  TThe Intercept

You can trace a lot of our problems back to Ronald Reagan. This is just one of them.

Trump, an alleged serial adulterer who has bragged about sexually assaulting women and has been accused of such behavior close to two dozen times, has asked that abstinence funding be increased. And in the budget deal he signed last month, he got his wish, enough to bring total spending on abstinence up to $100 million for 2018.

Oh, the irony. To be fair, though, he doesn't have a clue what he's signing.

Along with the return to Bush-era funding levels to push the ab-only message, Trump has appointed anti-abortion, anti-birth control, and pro-ab-only advocates to positions within the Department of Health and Human Services and has yanked funding for a successful evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention strategy.

And removed helpful women's health pages from the government website.

Given the clear failure of these programs, it’s perhaps unsurprising that ab-only advocates in recent years have made a concerted effort to rebrand their efforts — forsaking the title “abstinence education” in favor of “sexual-risk avoidance” programs, language co-opted from the public health community. Among the biggest proponents of ab-only programs — and their rebranding — is Valerie Huber, a Trump appointee to HHS. Huber started her career promoting ab-only programs in her son’s school before moving on to manage the ab-only program at the Ohio Department of Health. She became the president of the National Abstinence Education Association in 2007. (The advocacy organization has also rebranded itself. It’s now known as Ascend.)

Jesus, these people.

“Our critics like to pigeonhole this as a religious issue,” she said, “but the truth is that this has value for every student regardless of faith or moral framework — or lack thereof.”

Which is why they chose the name "Ascend"?

“They’re trying to rebrand because ‘abstinence-only’ has become a dirty term. There’s no support for abstinence-only programs.” Polling shows that parents “overwhelmingly” want their kids to be getting sex education in the classroom — education that talks about the “value” of abstinence, she says, “but in conjunction with understanding condoms, … contraception, and now, increasingly, wanting young people to know about consent” — none of which the ab-only programs actually do, no matter what they’re called.

[...]

Although the Trump administration’s goal was to completely defund the TPP Program [created during Obama's administration to test science- and evidence-based sex education programs], it lost that bid when lawmakers put money into the new budget to keep it going. Meanwhile, a number of groups involved in the TPP Program — including Planned Parenthood — have sued the administration in federal court, claiming that defunding the project mid-cycle violates the Administrative Procedures Act. [...] The lawsuits, filed last month, are pending.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.