The nation’s campaign to get more teenagers to delay sex and to use condoms is faltering, threatening to undermine the highly successful effort to reduce teen pregnancy and protect young people from sexually transmitted diseases, federal officials reported yesterday.
New data from a large government survey show that by every measure, a decade-long decline in sexual activity among high school students leveled off between 2001 and 2007, and that the rise in condom use by teens flattened out in 2003.
Moreover, the survey found disturbing hints that teen sexual activity may have begun creeping up and that condom use among high school students might be edging downward, though those trend lines have not yet reached a point where statisticians can be sure, officials said.
“The bottom line is: In all these areas, we don’t seem to be making the progress we were making before,” said Howell Wechsler, acting director of the division of adolescent and school health at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which conducts the survey. “It’s very troubling.”
Coming on the heels of reports that one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease and that the teen birth rate has increased for the first time in 15 years, the data are triggering alarm across the ideological spectrum.
I wish this rather superficial and unsatisfactory report by Rob Stein, a regular staff writer for the very liberal Washington Post, had included more actual statistics. More importatntly, the whole tone of the article seems strangely muted, given the alarm expressed by several of the experts quoted. It’s almost as if the writer adopts the attitude: “Well, teens will be teens. What do you expect?”
But perhaps the oddest thing about the article was the impression given that great progress had been made in the last decade and that the concern was this progress had stopped. Huh? Oh, really? When teen births out-of-wedlock have hit unprecedented highs? When AT LEAST one fourth of teen girls now have an STD? And it’s even worse when you realize that many of them don’t even know it, since some STD’s like chlamydia don’t show obvious symptoms, and this accelerates the spread of the epidemic.
About a month ago I happened to talk to a county health clinic official who conducts so-called “safe-sex” education (it’s value-free, of course, since it’s a government clinic) for the wealthy western Chicago suburbs of DuPage County, and she told me that in the Chicago area, it’s now up to about one in three teens (boys as well as girls). That is truly an EPIDEMIC. And some STD’s like herpes are incurable, and some render girls infertile for life.
Somehow, I don’t think things were quite so rosy over the last decade. The fact is that our culture is obsessed with sex and is in a state of moral free fall.
This article conveys a sort of hapless “We don’t know what to do” attitude, a sort of deer-caught-in-the-headlights paralysis. And if I’m right about that, it’s no surprise. When our mass media-driven culture endorses and exalts hedonism, and the dominant public philosophy of relativism undercutsis any serious attempt to reign in sex outside of marriage, is it any wonder our culture is in such deep, deep trouble?
Lord, have mercy. We so desperately need to hear again and heed the stern warning of the Apostle Paul: “Do not be deceived. God is not mocked. For you reap whatever you sow. If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh” (or old sinful nature, Gal. 6:7-8a). As a culture, we have been dreadfully deceived and misled. The “red alert” being communicated by some of the experts cited by Stein in this article is a kind of wake up call for a decadent society. But will we listen and heed the call?
David Handy+
Two questions — one, why would you write an article like this and not include what the percentages are? Yes, i found them on the CDC-P website, but that’s not what most people will do . . .
Which leads to my second question — since i’m going to skip pointing out the fact that abstinence-education is hedged in with sematically loaded language to keep it the marginal phenomenon that the author clearly thinks it should be. What if . . . and i’m just asking, not in a happy way . . . we’ve seen a leveling off because these numbers are about as low as you can ever hope to get them in general secular society?
# 2, I was struck by the same paradox. The article says that abstinence teaching does not work. The figures show a decline in promiscuity and a rise in self-control. Kinda bizarre, isn’t it, then to say that encouragement to abstinence and self-control does not work ?