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Two Responses: Abstinence is the Answer
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10653 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1993 |
1,118 Words |
| Author
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Hal Donofrio
Hal Donofrio is executive director of the Campaign for Our
Children in Baltimore. |
Teen pregnancy is the Achilles' heel of America. It sucks precious resources from education and health care. It makes a mockery of family values. It perpetuates our drug culture and fills our prisons and graveyards with young people. It all but guarantees a life of poverty, illiteracy, and endless "rehabilitation." Its progeny are literally born at risk.
This single problem has reached epidemic proportions, at a staggering cost to taxpayers. And when a teenager has a baby, she more often than not starts a cycle of poverty and lowered self-esteem that lasts generations and accounts for a domino sequence of expenditures to "cure" the problems that result. If teen pregnancy were eliminated today, a serious dent could be put in a host of other social issues, without raising taxes.
So the problem is clear and simple. But most of the "solutions" that have been proposed are fraught with adversarial resistance. And though some programs do exist, they are unacceptable to many citizens.
In fact, the only program that will ever be accepted by the voting majority will have abstinence education as its foundation. Without abstinence education as the core program, legislative support will never be as widespread as is needed. More importantly, without prevention as our goal, we cannot afford to continue current health, welfare, rehabilitation, and entitlement practices. Prevention is the goal and abstinence is the only guarantee to prevent pregnancy, STDs and AIDS.
An abstinence-based program has as its most important goal a continuation of abstinence among presexually active children. Or, to put it more simply, it changes (makes older) the average age that a young person has his or her first sexual intercourse. Considering that each day in a young life is important in the maturation process, the longer sex is delayed, the more thoughtful one becomes about disease, social desires, formal education, careers, and family planning.
In short, whether you approach abstinence from a religious, political, social, values, or life-style direction, it's the right way to go.
Abstinence education has been the cornerstone of the state of Maryland's teen pregnancy prevention program since 1987. And it has been successful. In fact, in 1989 and again in 1990 (most recent data) out-of-wedlock births to teenagers in Maryland were down 5 percent each year, while abortions were
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