Prescribing the Disease as the Cure

Leave it to the uber-religious fuckwits to come up with genius ideas like this:

I had to laugh at the absurd assumptions behind this headline from the American Family Association's OneNewsNow:

STDs have gone up, therefore we need more abstinence-only sex ed. Never mind that study after study has shown that kids who get abstinence-only sex ed are less likely to use condoms when they have sex.

You know why I love Ed Brayton? Because he's merciless with the statistics:

Let's look just at the state of Texas, which leads the nation in abstinence-only sex ed. 94% of all Texas school districts teach abstinence-only sex ed, with only 3% teaching abstinence-plus (abstinence plus condoms and other forms of birth control).

The result? Texas teenagers also are among the nation's leaders in unprotected sex.

Fifty-sex percent of high school students in Texas report having used condoms at last intercourse. Only three states have lower rates of condom use among students.

We already know that Texas has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the nation, despite 94% of them being taught abstinence-only. It's certainly no surprise that they also have an extraordinarily high rate of STD infections:

Young people ages 15-24 comprised twenty percent of Texas' new HIV cases in 2006.

Texas' youth, especially young women, are at risk for STIs:

• Youth ages 15-24 experienced 73 percent of the total number of Chlamydia cases in Texas in 2006.
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• Youth ages 15-24 experienced 61 percent of the total number of Gonorrhea cases in Texas in 2006.
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• For all youth in this age range, young women were most at risk for STIs, experiencing 83 percent of Chlamydia infections and 60 percent of gonorrhea infections.

So much for that argument.

I think it's time we turn the tables. Anti-choicers like to shove pictures of discarded fetal tissue in people's faces. Why not take a page from their book and start parading around outside their churches with blown-up photos of the effects of STDs? We can ask them why they're ruining kids' lives.

Here's just a few pics to get us started:

AIDS:

Advanced Kaposi’s sarcoma with marked lymphostatic oedema in a patient’s face.

(© J.H. Frenkel, Univ. Frankfurt)

Syphillis:

Lesions

Courtesy of the Sexual Health Guide blog





Chlamydia -

"A wicked case of crotch rot"







This is what they sentence kids to when the only advice they give is "Don't have sex."