Birds, Bees, and Bush

(In the title, I’m referring to Dubya and his administration, by the way....long one coming up.)

I’ve been trying to post something about this for the last couple of weeks, but I’ve gotten interrupted for various reasons. Well, here goes.

There have been a few stories coming out lately about how bad the “abstinence only” policy of the Bush Administration is for the reproductive and overall sexual health of teenagers in particular (as well as women in general). Nicholas Kristof, in a recent New York Times article (which I’ll get to shortly) referred to the policy as “a scandal”.

Sheryl McCarthy of Newsday also reported this on July 15th…

Abstinence-only sex education for teenagers took another hit last week when a prominent group of pediatricians came out in support of giving teens access to birth control.

In an article in the July journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the organization's committee on adolescence concludes that while pediatricians should encourage adolescents to postpone early sexual activity, they should also make sure youths have access to contraceptives, including emergency contraception.

The recommendation flies in the face of the abstinence-only approach being pushed by the Bush administration and religious groups. And dramatically, the article abandoned the academy's former policy that called abstinence counseling "an important role for all pediatricians.

Why?

"Because there isn't any evidence that that message is effective," said Dr. Scott Spear, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and chairman of the national medical committee of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

"As scientists, we're saying we don't want politics to trump what's healthy and safe for young people."

The academy's report is one more in a series of studies that have concluded that the just-say-no approach has no proven record of reducing sexual activity or pregnancy among teenagers.

And this one comes directly from the doctors who treat young people.

Yet the Bush administration is relentlessly pushing on with its efforts to make sure that the abstinence-only message is the only kind of sex education available to young people.

In 2001, a few years after the push to expand such programs began, the federal government spent $80 million on abstinence-only programs. It will spend $167 million in this fiscal year.

"We've got more than 10 years of federal financing to the tune of $700 million for abstinence-only, and no science shows that it's effective," Spear told me.

While no one, including myself, wants to encourage sexual activity among teenagers, the abstinence-only policy is flawed because it chooses idealism over helping young people with the lives they actually lead.

The academy found that 45 percent of high school girls and 48 percent of high school boys have already had sexual intercourse. And while the teenage pregnancy rate has been dropping in recent years, the main cause has not been increased celibacy, but the use of more effective birth control, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute.

The problem with abstinence-only is not that it promotes abstinence, but that it's anti-birth-control. A Columbia University study in 2000 found that while adolescent pledges to remain virgins until marriage delayed the age of first intercourse briefly, when the pledgers did have sex they were less likely than non-pledgers to use birth control.

A congressional study done last year found that abstinence-only programs were rife with misinformation: teaching students that condoms don't help prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and that legal abortions lead to sterility and to premature births. They also promote sexual stereotypes about boys and girls.

Frankly, I'm less worried about the fact that a 17-year-old girl has sex with her boyfriend than I am about whether she has thought the decision through carefully, has chosen a caring partner, and is using a dependable form of birth control.

The problem with the Bush administration's approach is that it's practicing faith-based medicine, and one of the results is that 900,000 teenagers still get pregnant every year.

Groups such as the academy need to keep telling the truth until the message sticks, and until science and sound social policy begin to trump politics.

Kelly Mangan also wrote this in January…

In George W. Bush's first budget to Congress (April 9, 2001), he scrapped the provision that required insurance companies to cover contraceptives for 9 million federal employees (something House democrats later reinstated). Bush insisted that this measure was meant to save money, but if were we really concerned with saving money, perhaps he should have spent less on tax cuts to the rich instead of axing programs that benefit women.

Also on April 9, Bush blocked U.S. grants to family-planning groups that provide contraceptive and abortion services/counseling overseas. While the president has certainly done his part to limit the knowledge and options of women abroad, the focus of Bush's war on women is at home.

And…

On March 1, 2002, Bush appointed Tom Coburn and Joe McIlhaney to lead the President's Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. Both Coburn and McIlhaney have spoken out against condom use, and have worked to push abstinence as the only means to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS (Source: Planned Parenthood web site).

(My note here…Coburn, unfortunately, was elected by the voters of Oklahoma to the U.S. Senate last year after he said that “same-sex marriage is a bigger threat to our country than terrorism,” and also after he said that he would check the Constitution to see if it represents, “the moral code that I follow.” Stand up and take another bow, you red state numbskulls!)

Bush nominated Justice Janice Rogers Brown for U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Brown upheld the right of Catholic hospitals to refuse employees' health coverage to include birth control.

Dr. David Hager--whom Bush appointed to the FDA's Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs--refuses to prescribe contraception to unmarried women in his gynecological practice. Bush also appointed Dr. Joseph Stanford to the same committee. In his family practice, Dr. Sanford refuses to prescribe birth control at all (Source: National Women’s Law Center press release, July 2001).

At the 2002 U.N. Population Conference, Assistant Secretary of State Arthur Dewey- another right-wing Bush appointee- promised that the U.S. would block any U.N. policies that contain the words "reproductive health" or "consistent condom use." Delegates from all over the world said America's position at this conference put women's health at risk, and even the delegate from Iran said that the U.S. Government had been overrun by religious extremists.

Oh, great (or, as Kos would say, "pot, meet kettle...").

Bush also appointed acting FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford and Acting Drug Chief Stephen Galson, who decided not to approve the Morning-After Pill for over-the-counter sales. And just incase Crawford and Galson didn't realize how they were supposed to decide, it was clearly outlined in a Jan. 14 letter to President Bush from 49 conservative state legislators. The letter demanded that President Bush stop the FDA from deciding in favor of Morning-After Pill over-the-counter.

Here’s more from Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times in February…

To get federal funds (for sex education), abstinence-only programs are typically barred by law from discussing condoms or other forms of contraception – except to describe how they can fail. So kids in these programs go all through high school without learning anything but abstinence, even though more than 60 percent of American teenagers have sex before they’re 18.

And…

Other developed countries focus much more on contraception. The upshot is that while teenagers in the U.S. have about as much sexual activity as teenagers in Canada or Europe, American girls are four times as likely as German girls to become pregnant, almost five times as likely as French girls to have a baby, and more than seven times as likely as Dutch girls to have an abortion. Young Americans are five times as likely to have H.I.V. as young Germans, and teenagers’ gonorrhea rate is 70 times higher in the U.S. than in the Netherlands or France…

In contrast, there’s plenty of evidence that abstinence-plus programs – which encourage abstinence but also teach contraception – delay sex and increase the use of contraception. So, at a time when we’re cutting school and health programs, why should we pour additional tax money into abstinence-only initiatives, which are likely to lead to more pregnancies, more abortions, and more kids with AIDS?

Now that’s a scandal.

Mangan finished her January column with this…

Over the past four years, we have seen that progress on women's issues is obstructed at every turn by the Bush administration-he and other Republicans have done everything in their power to take away women's contraceptive, abortion, childcare, and healthcare options. But women, united, have the power to change this.

Not just women, but everyone. Especially now, since Bush has nominated Roberts for the Supreme Court, whose hostility towards issues of women’s reproductive health has been well documented.

I think we can all agree that we want everyone – girls, boys, men, women – to have the best information on this subject at their disposal that we can provide. We also want to get this notion that “oral sex isn’t really sex” (practiced by Clinton before he was forced to “see the light,” unfortunately) out of their heads for good. The stakes are just too high for us not to do that.