LAST WEEK saw the University's Peer Health Educators tabling and flyering central Grounds for "Sexual Responsibility Week," handing out condoms and engaging students in a dialogue about safer sex. Congress would do well to follow their example in making this "Legislative Sexual Responsibility Week."
Currently on the desks of members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee is the Prevention First Act of 2005, a bill that would take serious and scientifically sound measures to prevent sexually transmitted infections and unintended pregnancies, as well as decrease the number of abortions in the United States by expanding education and access to contraceptives. Authored by a pro-life Democrat, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, the Prevention First Act demonstrates that while reproductive choice may be a divisive and partisan issue, ensuring that there are fewer abortions should be something that Americans on each side of the abortion divide can agree upon.
If passed, the omnibus bill will take unprecedented steps to decrease unintentional pregnancies, and therefore abortions.Some of the most effective of the legislation's provisions include an increase in funding for Title X of the Public Health Service Act, which has made great strides in preventing unintended pregnancies (and is prohibited from using program funds to pay for abortions); and the requirement of private health plans to cover prescription contraceptives equal to their coverage of other prescription drugs. The bill also mandates that hospitals receiving federal money provide information about emergency contraception to survivors of sexual assault and would establish $20 million in annual funding for grants to create teen pregnancy prevention initiatives.
Perhaps most important is Title VII of the bill, the "Accuracy of Contraceptive Information" provision. This title mandates that any federally funded program must provide information that is medically accurate and inclusive of benefits, detriments and failure rates of all forms of contraception.
This mandate would be, for anyone who's been keeping track, a striking departure from the current policy of funding "abstinence-only" education to the tune of about $140 million a year. While the idea of raising a generation of young people to "just say no" to premarital sex sounds like a great idea, any Peer Health Educator can tell you that the way to promote responsible sexuality is not to put a chokehold on the information available to young people, especially not young people who are going to be sexually active anyway.According to the National Survey of Adolescents and Young Adults by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2003, nearly two-thirds of all high school seniors in the U.S. have had sexual intercourse. What's worse is that these students are the ones who are products of the "abstinence-only" paradigm, which means that not only are they engaging in sexual activity, but when they do, they're likelier to do it unsafely and without proper education.
The American Psychological Society presented a study in 2003, finding that of college students who had pledged to remain virgins until marriage during middle and high school, 60 percent of them had broken that pledge. And of those who claimed that they had kept their pledge, a majority (55 percent) had engaged in oral sex. The kicker: Teens who took virginity pledges are more likely to have unprotected sex when they broke their pledge than teens who never took the abstinence vow to begin with.
Enough is enough. If a group of University students like the Peer Health Educators can recognize that the only way to prevent unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections is to provide young people with information on the consequences of all contraceptive options, surely the distinguished members of the United States Senate can reconsider the spending of millions on programs that actually worsen the problem that they were created to solve. Advocating sexual responsibility does not mean advocating teen sex. It simply means taking a conscientious approach to decreasing abortions, teen pregnancy and disease. The PHEs follow this approach in handing out condoms; Congress should follow suit and pass the Prevention First Act.
Katie Cristol's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kcristol@cavalierdaily.com.
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