Via 365Gay…

CDC Pressured To Drop Abstinence Foe & Include Supporter At STD Conference

(Washington) The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has bowed to pressure from a Republican congressman to include two abstinence-only proponents to a federal panel on STDs, bypassing the scientific approval process according to a published report.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind) the chair of the House subcommittee on drug policy accused the CDC of including only opponents of abstinence programs on the panel to be held Tuesday at the National STD Prevention Conference in Jacksonville, Fla.

In e-mail to Health and Human Services officials, obtained by the Inquirer, Souder’s office asked whether the CDC was "clear about the controversial nature of this session and its obvious anti-abstinence objective."

"It was clear that there was not a scintilla of something positive about the abstinence education method," Michelle Gress, an aide to Souder told the paper.

Critics of congressional interference at the CDC said they were concerned that scientific studies on sexual behavior would not be made public if they conflicted with the administration’s pro abstinence stand.

Jonathan Zenilman, president of the American Sexually Transmitted Diseases Association and conference organizer said that the two pro-abstinence people added to the panel are not scientists.

"These people aren’t scientists; they haven’t written anything," he told the Inquirer. "The only reason they’re here is because of political pressure from the administration."

To make room for the abstinence proponents the CDC dropped two researchers from the panel – one a Penn State scientist who had prepared a discussion paper on how abstinence programs were tied to rising STD rates.

Emphasis mine.  I have a follow-up post in the works about the republican war on sex, since the Sunday Times conveniently did an article about it.  But for now just note that it does not matter whether or not it abstinence programs meet any scientific objective.  They meet a political one.  The lack of any scientific credentials on the part of the abstinence proponents is actually a plus.  It means they can’t be suspected of having any loyalty to the evidence.

Evidence like…oh…this…

Teens’ virginity pledges often don’t last, study finds

Many teens taking virginity pledges renege on them and others take them after having had intercourse, according to a study released Tuesday by the Harvard School of Public Health.

Researcher Janet Rosenbaum studied the responses of 13,568 participants, ages 12 to 18, from a 1995 national survey and compared them with a follow-up study a year later.

She found that 52% of adolescents who made the pledge not to have sex until marriage in the 1995 survey denied making such a vow a year later.

Dig it.  They not only broke the pledge, they denied ever even making it.  It’s real easy to make that kind of pledge early in adolescence, when the hormones haven’t quite gotten up to temperature, and real hard to keep it later on.  Ask me how I know.

But that’s not to say that these virginity pledges don’t benefit anyone…

The federal government is spending $178 million in the 2006 fiscal year for abstinence education, the council said.

Any guesses as to how much of that money goes to "faith based" institutions?  Republican friendly faith based institutions?

The mistake of course, is assuming that the goal of abstinence education is specifically to stop people from having sex.  In the grand scheme of things it is, surely.  But what abstinence education does is deprive people, teens specifically but not exclusively, of the knowledge they need to avoid getting pregnant or getting sexually transmitted disease.  Like a room full of carbon monoxide gas, which doesn’t so much suffocate as prevent the blood from being able to absorb oxygen, abstinence education exists to prevent education, so to make the sex lives of teens and adults more dangerous.

If the goal to be achieved is, as the abstinence proponents claim, to prevent kids from engaging in behavior that can be dangerous to their health, to their very lives, then they need look no further then the experience of the Netherlands, whose comprehensive sex education is light years beyond the kind of frankness the religious right would ever tolerate here in the United States…and yet their rates of teenage pregnancies and STDs are among the lowest in the world.  There’s your answer: Teach kids the facts about sex and human sexuality.  But that’s not the question.  The religious and political right aren’t trying to keep kids and adults safe, they’re trying to keep them from having sex.  They’re trying to keep them from having sex, by making it more dangerous for them to have it.  Even if that means killing some of them.  Especially if that means killing some of them…

Will cancer vaccine get to all women?

Deaths from cervical cancer could jump fourfold to a million a year by 2050, mainly in developing countries. This could be prevented by soon-to-be-approved vaccines against the virus that causes most cases of cervical cancer – but there are signs that opposition to the vaccines might lead to many preventable deaths.

The trouble is that the human papilloma virus (HPV) is sexually transmitted. So to prevent infection, girls will have to be vaccinated before they become sexually active, which could be a problem in many countries.

In the US, for instance, religious groups are gearing up to oppose vaccination, despite a survey showing 80 per cent of parents favor vaccinating their daughters. "Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV," says Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, a leading Christian lobby group that has made much of the fact that, because it can spread by skin contact, condoms are not as effective against HPV as they are against other viruses such as HIV.

"Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex," Maher claims, though it is arguable how many young women have even heard of the virus.

A license to have sex…  Pay attention to that.  The problem with the vaccine, according to the Family Research Council, isn’t that it doesn’t work, but that it does.  In fact, it appears to be 100 percent effective in protecting women from the human papilloma virus, which is the primary cause of cervical cancer in the United States…a cancer that strikes more than 10,000 women in the U.S. each year, and kills over 3,700.  Take that shadow of death away from people and, according to the religious right, you have given them a license to have sex.

And that’s why science is unwelcome on a CDC panel on sexually transmitted diseases.  Science and medicine cure disease and make pregnancy a matter of choice, and that gives us permission to have sex, and only the man behind the pulpit can give us permission to have sex.  Got that?  In a nation where the mullahs cannot legally stone to death people who have sex without their permission, pregnancy and disease are all they have left to hope for.  And make no mistake, hope they do.