guest commentary by Bill Beckman, Exec. Dir., Illinois Right to Life
A recent poll by Zogby International again confirms earlier polls showing that American parents strongly support abstinence education for their children. Almost 90% of parents agree that being sexually abstinent is best for their child's health and future. About 80% think it's important for their child to wait until they're married to have sex.
Similarly, 80% of parents think sex education in public schools should place more emphasis on abstinence instead of contraceptive use. The survey also found strong support for Federal funding of abstinence education programs despite opposition from abortion advocates in Congress. About 60% of parents say more funding should go to abstinence education instead of comprehensive sex education and only 20% want more sex education funding.
Planned Parenthood’s own statistics demonstrate the wisdom of parents on abstinence education. Jennifer Roback Morse just reported on two Planned Parenthood studies that show how unreliable both the pill and condom are for most groups of young people. These studies break down the population into age groups, income levels, marital status and race. A poor cohabiting teenager using the pill has a failure rate of 48.4%. This means nearly half of poor cohabiting teenagers get pregnant during their first year using the pill. As a comparison, a middle-aged, middle-class married woman has a 3% chance of getting pregnant after a year on the pill. Likewise, over 70% of poor, cohabiting teenagers using condoms will be pregnant within a year.
Such results confirm that Planned Parenthood knows that their so-called comprehensive sex education will not reduce pregnancies and abortions among teenagers, but such programs will certainly produce new customers for Planned Parenthood. As Ms. Morse observes:
These figures cast new light on the debate over contraception education. The commonly quoted failure rates of 8% for the Pill and 15% for the condom are inflated by the highly successful use by middle-aged, middle-class married couples. Yet, the government promotes contraception most heavily among the young, the poor and the single. The “overall failure rates” are simply not relevant to this target population. Planned Parenthood and its allies in the sex education business have had conniptions over federal funding for abstinence education. But at least abstinence actually works. If you don’t have sex, you won’t get pregnant. It works every time.
With contraception, we can absolutely predict that some sexual encounters will result in pregnancy. The young, the poor and the unmarried are the most likely to experience a contraceptive failure. For these groups, pregnancy is not a rare accident, but highly likely. When the inevitable pregnancy occurs, guess who is ready to help solve her problem? That’s right: Planned Parenthood will sell her an abortion. The same people who teach sex education, which increases the demand for purchasing contraception, also sell the “solution” to contraceptive failure, which is abortion. Yet the federal government spends about $12 on contraceptive-related programs to every $1 spent on abstinence education.
We don’t give federal grants to tobacco companies to teach students “low-risk” forms of smoking on the grounds that “kids are going to smoke anyway.” We shouldn’t be giving federal grants to groups that sell contraception, to teach kids to use contraception. It is time for the federal government to get out of the sex education business once and for all.
IRLC could not agree more. Planned Parenthood has a blatant conflict of interest. They are focused on making money by expanding their customer base, not on providing for the health and well being of teenagers.
