Did You Know that Sex Can Kill?     5/29/2002

Did You Know that Sex Can Kill?
No, we’re not talking about AIDS
By Sandy Rios and

Everyone knows that HIV is fatal. But how many know that at least 5,000 women die yearly in the U.S. from a sexually transmitted disease (STD)?

Virtually all cases of cervical cancer are caused by Human Papillomavirus (HPV), an STD that infects more than 5 million people annually. Condoms are utterly useless against HPV and nearly useless against genital herpes. Despite this, the government is still spending millions of dollars to persuade kids to have “safe sex” by using condoms.

As the epidemic rages, the one bright spot is the success of abstinence programs, which reduce teen sexual activity. Yet now that the House has re-authorized $50 million a year for abstinence programs in the welfare reform bill, pro-condom critics are furious, as evidenced by two recent Washington Post columns.

On May 12, Philip D. Harvey’s “Adulthood Without Sex” column in the Post misrepresented abstinence programs as merely “exhortations to abstain from sexual activity.” On May 17, Richard Cohen’s “Abstinence or Obstinacy” in the Post called abstinence programs a “totalitarian concept,” because they don’t provide how-to instruction typical of condom-based programs.

Mr. Harvey, as it turns out, has a vested interest in sexually active teens. He sells sex toys and hard-core porn videos, as Post media critic Howard Kurtz later acknowledged after Harvey’s pedigree was exposed by Greg Pierce in The Washington Times. For his part, Mr. Cohen is just repeating the liberal line justifying the condom-based approach favored by sexual revolutionaries from Alfred Kinsey to Joycelyn Elders.

Abstinence programs have been federally funded since only 1997, but are already reporting successes. A recent Heritage Foundation report details how 10 independently evaluated abstinence programs have reduced teen sexual activity from 17 to 50 percent.

By contrast, Planned Parenthood’s $3 billion promotion of condoms and birth control pills since 1970 has produced meteoric rises in teen unwed births, abortions and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Within the first five years of Planned Parenthood’s opening of Title X family planning clinics, out-of-wedlock births multiplied from 190,000 to 223,000, and teen abortions soared from 90,000 in 1970 to a half a million in post-Roe 1975.

Health authorities now contend with more than 20 venereal diseases, up from two
(syphilis and gonorrhea) before “safe sex” education dawned. Herpes, HIV and Human Papillomavirus (HPV) are incurable. To repeat: condoms have little effect against herpes, and none against HPV. Anyone feel “safe” yet?

Mr. Cohen complains that in abstinence programs, “Condoms may be mentioned, but only in the context of their failure rates.” If you were issued a parachute, would you ask about all the times they worked or how often they failed? Kids deserve to know that condoms are utterly useless against HPV and have failure rates from 15 to 31 percent in preventing HIV.

We don’t ask kids not to smoke marijuana or snort cocaine and then tell them the “safest” way to do it. “Comprehensive” and “abstinence-plus” programs tell teens that we assume they will be sexually active, equip them to do so, and provide the back-up “solutions” of abortions and drugs to deal with the STD symptoms. This “safety net” has encouraged kids to experiment at earlier ages, with tragic results. A predatory “youth culture” glorifying sex and drugs is also culpable, but it’s hard to overestimate the impact of school authority figures dangling condoms in front of kids.

Mr. Harvey curiously invokes the word “moral” twice to attack sexual morality, and declares that cohabiting leads to happier, enduring marriages. Research shows that couples that have sex before marriage or cohabit are far likelier to divorce. According to a study in the Journal of Marriage and Family, couples that have sex before marriage are 50 percent likelier to head for Reno than those who don’t.

Finally, Mr. Harvey contends that since people are marrying later, they can’t be expected to refrain from sex. Could this be self-fulfilling? Egged on by “safe sex” advocates, many people waste years in reckless experimentation that could have been spent building a marriage. And just because Mr. Cohen thinks saving sex for marriage is “sanctimonious nonsense” doesn’t mean other folks can’t keep their pants on.

Let’s be truly realistic. It’s time to abandon the “safe sex” lie and instead teach about sex within the larger context of character, risks, life goals and marriage. That’s why abstinence programs work.

Sandy Rios is president of Concerned Women for America. Robert Knight is director of CWA’s Culture and Family Institute and a member of the advisory board of the Abstinence Clearinghouse. A slightly edited version of this column ran in The Washington Post on May 25, 2002, under the headline: “Abstinence Is the Best Policy.”

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