I bet Elizabeth Smart and Jaycee Dugard felt a roller coaster of emotions when they heard about Amanda Berry's rescue yesterday. I know I did. Let's not forget the thousands of other American girls who are out there working as sex slaves.
While it's great to explain the benefits of abstinence, Christians have begun to rely too heavily on a shame-based rhetoric that motivates teens into compliance for fear of being "dirty" or undesirable. I cannot tell you how many women I have counseled who became sexually active in their teen years and consequently felt like they were damaged goods.
How much could it cost to keep teenagers from having sex? More than $100 million per year over the course of five years would be a good starting place...
Belated, but sincerely -- I want us all to observe Feb. 7 as it was National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. Hydeia Broadbent claimed the hearts of m...
Iowa Governor Terry Branstad was ahead of the anti-voter curve. As one of his first acts as governor, Branstad signed an executive order ending a policy that automatically gave ex-felons the right to vote after they were released from prison.
Abstinence-only programs don't exist "for the kids," or because of risks. They exist almost wholly because Republicans -- and Democrats in Tennessee -- are trying to placate a religious minority, even if it means exposing teens to greater harms.
It is time for Wisconsin's legislators to learn to accept reality. The fact that young people have sex is not changing. What must change, however, is the return to comprehensive and honest sex education for our youth.
A bill requiring sex education classes to teach an abstinence-only curriculum moved closer to becoming a law in Utah Wednesday. The state House pas...
The ordinance will not be very effective at influencing the overall depiction of sex in imagery and media. This outcome is all the more lamentable because encouraging condom use is so important. Let's look at the facts.
WASHINGTON -- Young elementary school students should use the proper names for body parts and, by the end of fifth grade, know that sexual orientation...
A bill launched during Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's jobs session and nearing passage in the Legislature would repeal significant portions of the stat...
What is the most effective way to educate young people about sex? What can we do to minimize unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections (STIs)? Does abstinence-only education work? Some people think so.
A bill that would require schools in Wisconsin to promote abstinence and marriage in sexual education classes has passed in the Senate, the Northweste...
This week a few brave politicians stood up to protest the political attacks aimed squarely at women's health.
Where I grew up, in the buckle of the Bible Belt, sex, when it was discussed at all, was presented as something to be feared -- it bred diseases and u...
Not so many years ago, we laughed at a whole kookball buffet of socio-pathetic phenomena: Hummers as mutant status symbols. Promise rings. Gay meth-snorting megachurch pastors. Ahh, simpler times. It all seems so innocent now.
In Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont, for instance, 2008 birth rates were less than 25 per 1,000 teens aged 15 to 19, CDC found. I...
What do you get when you combine the country's most visible proponent of abstinence, the most in-your-face seeker of casual sex, a pack of gold condom...
Concerns about Slaughterhouse-Five, Speak, and Twenty Boy Summer highlight a deeper and more troubling belief -- that is, that young people should be prevented from exposure to anything that discusses sex and sexual activity in any way.
Two governors who were vocal opponents of health care reform are now requesting federal grants for abstinence-only education that are funded by that v...
Teenage pregnancy isn't the epidemic. The lack of information and support for people to make healthy decisions about their lives is the true epidemic. The culture of shame and scapegoating around sex is the real problem.
Imagine a quarter of a billion dollars, approved by Democrats for programs which the vast majority of them know don't work. The money was attached to ...
The 2007 legislation may have been a victory for advocates of comprehensive sex education in Colorado. But in the larger war over what gets taught in ...
By James Wagoner, President, Advocates for Youth Lost in the shuffle of analysis of the new health care reform legislation, is the fact that Democrat...
I readily concede that moral boundaries and restraint are crucial to good living. But I am suspicious of the Pharisaic distortions, namely an irrational rigidity, or the sorts of bizarre loopholes and rationalizations common to those who take abstinence vows.
