Category Archives: Medical Issues

Does Abstinence Work?

Jane Jimenez

March 14, 2005

“We’ve seen it sneaking up on us, we’ve known it’s a problem, and now it’s reaching epidemic proportions,” Anne Loudenslager told CNN. She heads the Tioga County Partnership for Community Health. “We are using a good portion of our limited resources to stop this.”

Dr. Ellsworth, a director of research on the problem, said he hopes to have several hundred children in a new health program this year. He calls himself an optimist. One has to wonder why. Everything in the CNN health report proves that things are going from bad to worse.

In northeast Pennsylvania, one in 10 kindergartners were found to be obese in 2001-2002. That number doubled for eighth-graders.

These high numbers of obesity are predictors of future health problems. During a recent health fair, Ellsworth found that 60 percent of adults tested had metabolic syndrome, a collection of unhealthy conditions that raise the risk for diabetes and heart disease.

Nevertheless, Ms. Loudenslager and Dr. Ellsworth talk tough. The community is galvanized to solve this health crisis. At the largest high school in the county, they plan to alter physical education next year. Students will have more choices: sports teams, wellness classes, and traditional gym classes. The goal is to get kids involved, get them moving, and get them healthy.

Maybe they want to help the kids, but shouldn’t we be asking a few questions about their plan first? After all, the community resources are limited. And here they are devoting a good portion of those resources to unproven programs with no statistical evidence that new gym classes will make kids loose weight.

If this were a story on the epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, reporters would be all over the health officials demanding proof positive that taxpayer money was not going to be wasted on failed programs.

If this were a story on teen sex, reporters would not give the good Dr. Ellsworth a pass at being an optimist. They would feed him the statistics to prove how hopeless the future is for fat teens.

After all, Dr. Ellsworth said it himself. “The numbers for obesity in children were nowhere near what they are today and you can just imagine what we’re going to be looking at 10 to 20 years from now if nothing is done,” he told reporters. “That 60 percent … that’s going to seem like a pretty low figure.”

If this were a story on abstinence, reporters would help him prove the hopelessness of the future. They would pick a teen and show how impossible Dr. Ellsworth’s job will be.

“I’ve started trying to take it easy on the junk food,” sophomore Ray Crawford says. At 240 pounds and 5 ft. 9 inches tall, he is already a promising lineman for the school’s football team. And if he’s overweight, he’s not alone. So are many of his classmates.

Sure Ray hopes to change his eating habits and exercise. But a good reporter would go after such baseless optimism. After all, Ray’s father died of heart disease at 45. And, according to Dr. Jeff Holm of North Dakota, “…Habits are passed vertically from Grandma on down.”

If this were a story on abstinence, the reporter would search high and low for experts to quote on the inevitability of fat habits. After all, eating is natural. All kids are going to eat. Do we want kids to feel bad about themselves, hurting their self-esteem by telling them they are fat?

If this were a story on abstinence, the reporter would serve up a research study to prove that nobody can really lose weight and keep it off. We would read about yo-yo diets where kids lose weight one week, and put it back on the next.

If this were a story on abstinence, the reporter would find a student who had failed. We would hear all about how temptation was just too hard to pass up. Photos would trace the weight gain of the student from kindergarten to high school, and quotes would be plied from the student: “I’ve tried, but I just can’t seem to control myself.”

And armed with data, quotes, and examples, the reporter would stick it to the good doctor. “Aren’t you just wasting your time? Wouldn’t taxpayer money be better spent on finding ways to make Styrofoam into tasty and nutritious food substitutes?”

Where are the tough journalists when you need them? Where is the skepticism, the doubt, the challenge and resistance?

You can talk about exercise all day long. You can have your fancy schmancy gyms, and you can serve vegetables in the school cafeteria. But before we give you one thin dime of our precious limited resources, tell us what we want to know.

Do exercise and good eating habits work?

April 30, 2004: Condoms: A Failure to Protect

September 10, 2004: Duh

See Archives for past editorials.

All the Condoms in the World

Jane Jimenez

February 14, 2005

How many condoms would it take to end the AIDS crisis?

In 1998, Sharon Stone urged parents worldwide to set out a basket of condoms for their children…as many as 200…encourage your children to play with them, take them, give them to their friends…condoms and more condoms for our children, she pleaded, because we love them.

You can’t really blame Ms. Stone. After all, condoms had been the centerpiece of our response to AIDS since news stories in 1982 first announced the arrival of HIV in America.

Immediately, the deadly virus sent us into a panic. School children wanted to know if they could get HIV from mosquitoes. Mothers wanted to know if public pools were safe for their children. Grown men quit going to the gym and bought weight machines for the garage.

Worst of all, liberated sex, once a promise of unrestrained pleasure born on the wings of the birth control pill and coed college dorms, became a risky adventure. Scientists scrambled in their labs to put definition to the virus while health officials struggled to suggest ways to avoid contracting it.

Americans needed answers in a crisis where precious few answers were available. And so we grasped at the closest thing we could find…the condom.

We could have ended coed dorms on college campuses. Instead we enlightened students with the ten-step method of putting on a condom.

The Centers for Disease Control could have closed the gay bath houses so prominent in San Francisco and New York. Instead, the CDC preached condoms.

We could have come together as a society to reject sexual promiscuity. Instead we set out baskets of condoms in high school guidance offices.

A wake-up call arrived this week. The New York Times reports, “A rare strain of HIV that is highly resistant to virtually all anti-retroviral drugs and appears to lead to the rapid onset of AIDS was detected in a New York City man last week.” Health officials are said to be alarmed. But they shouldn’t be surprised.

Four years earlier, The Arizona Republic reported, “People who catch HIV are increasingly likely to encounter mutant forms of the virus that are able to resist some of the drugs commonly used to treat the infection. Drug-resistant strains have been a major problem since the start of treatment in the early years of the AIDS epidemic.”

Drug resistant strains of virus have long been known to scientists. The CDC could have predicted this would happen. Instead, they plowed ahead, with the help of science superstars like Sharon Stone, to put a basket of condoms in every home.

America didn’t stop with handing out condoms to our own kids. From 1989 to 2000, over 232,000,000 condoms were sent annually to eleven African nations. While that’s not even close to all the condoms in the world, that’s a heck of a lot of condoms.

In Zambabwe, their allowance provided the highest number of condoms per male for this group of nations. Zimbabwe also had the highest HIV prevalence rate. More condoms…and more AIDS.

It takes a courageous leader to set aside the popular mantra and evaluate the AIDS epidemic with a clear mind. Ugandan President and Mrs. Museveni are just such leaders. They were able to look past the mountains of condoms and see the obvious. Lack of condoms doesn’t cause AIDS. Sex with infected people causes AIDS.

Uganda chose a different path. One of its governmental booklets published in 1989 stated with assurance, “The government does not recommend using condoms as a way to fight AIDS.” Condoms gave users “a false impression that they were safe from AIDS.”

Choosing to support a return to their traditional cultural values, Ugandans educated and supported one another in saving sex for marriage and in honoring their marriage with fidelity. Because they believed it could be done, they did it. And today, experts from the world are traveling to Uganda to study their great sexual experiment…self-control.

Meanwhile, in the United States, as we contemplate how to face this latest AIDS scare, the old condom battle heats up once again. This time, however, “a radical idea, born of desperation,” is taking hold in some quarters. AIDS workers dismayed over a new battle against a stronger virus are considering a novel idea…novel that is, for Americans. They are calling for an end to promiscuous sex.

How many condoms will it take to end the AIDS epidemic? Zero.

Yes, that’s right. Zero.

Confronting people with their personal responsibility for curbing sexual behavior is beginning to sound more reasonable all the time. Even the CDC has turned the corner on its website, “The surest way to avoid transmission of sexually transmitted diseases is to abstain from sexual intercourse, or to be in a long-term mutually monogamous relationship with a partner who has been tested and you know is uninfected.”

And what do you know…that doesn’t take a single condom. Not one.

April 30, 2004: Condoms: A Failure to Protect

June 4, 2004: AIDS: Importing the Cure

See Archives for past editorials.

The Pregnant Elephant in the Room

Jane Jimenez

January 17, 2005

It was a shocking statement to hear my friend Joan say, “I personally don’t think sex education is comprehensive enough.” But she made perfect sense.

“Comprehensive” has come to mean “condoms and birth control” in debates about sex education. Comprehensive sex educators insist on the necessity of demonstrating condoms and instructing students on birth control. But condoms and birth control were the last thing on Joan’s mind.

She has spent years counseling women who sought her out to deal with the negative consequences of their abortions. Their pain is easy for her to understand. At the age of 19, over twenty years ago, Joan had an abortion, too.

“I was a college freshman when I got pregnant,” she recalls, “and my boyfriend insisted that I have an abortion. He wanted to finish school and we would get married after that. I gave in to his desires.”

Like so many young women today, Joan thought love was the focus of their relationship. “I thought we were in love….I wasn’t disturbed by the pregnancy at all. I was excited about it. I really wanted the baby, but he put pressure on me….I didn’t want to lose him.”

Isolated at the time, relying on her boyfriend’s advice, Joan had the abortion. Only later, after severe medical complications arose, did her parents find out. But more important to Joan were the severe emotional consequences.

Her boyfriend was unable to handle her emotions and took Joan to see his family psychiatrist. “His psychiatrist told me that he couldn’t see any reason for my depression and my grief and my regret…that I had done the right thing and I needed to get over it and get on with my life.” Only two months after the abortion performed for his sake, her boyfriend left.

Not a religious person at the time, and unaware of fetal development, Joan still felt extreme shame and guilt. “I knew that I was pregnant with a baby I wanted. And immediately afterwards, I knew that that baby…I would never hold that baby.”

Eventually, Joan married and became the mother of two children. Her life then was filled with “triggers,” moments when her abortion would come to life, and emotions would flood her. “When our son was born, I just looked at him and thought, “He’s not your first child. He’s your second. And your first you gave back. You don’t deserve this one.”

Striving to become the perfect, loving mother and to reclaim the pain of her abortion, she began working at a local crisis pregnancy center. It was there where, working over eight years with pregnant moms and women who had had abortions, Joan found healing. She learned she was not alone. Her experiences of abandonment, shame and guilt were common among other post-abortive women.

Joan looks at sex education today and criticizes the failure to discuss the obvious…the pregnant elephant in the room. “I don’t believe they talk about the consequences strongly enough.” Condoms have a pregnancy failure rate for teens of approximately 22%. “I believe,” Joan says, “that if abortion is talked about as a possible consequence to sexual activity. Kids might make a different choice about becoming sexually active.”

Even when abortion is discussed, Joan points out, “It’s been sugar-coated… ‘This is nothing more than a very simple, quick medical procedure, probably not as traumatic as having a tooth pulled.’”

While some educators have begun to change their rhetoric, Joan is quick to challenge their fence-sitting. “Either it is a horrible heart-wrenching difficult decision with all of the implications of that, with the emotional damage and the reality of what it does to the child…or it is simpler than having a tooth pulled. Which is it?”

Coupled with the lack of comprehensive discussions about abortions, sex educators offer almost no information on fetal development. Over 138,000 abortions were performed in 2001 on women age 19 and under according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Often facing an abortion decision in isolation, teens may lack true knowledge about the stage of development of their baby. Years later, when pregnant with a child they will keep and with intimate knowledge of fetal development, they often experience a delayed and traumatic reaction to their abortion.

Joan speaks openly about abortion these days. And she calls others to do the same. There is a pregnant elephant in the room, and we need to start talking openly about what to do with it.

The next time an educator promotes comprehensive sex education to you, ask them if they present the harmful consequences of abortion to young people. Ask them if they teach young people about the development of a baby in the womb. And if they don’t, ask them, “Why not?”

Joan is right. If we’re going to be comprehensive, it’s time to start discussing the pregnant elephant.

June 5, 2004: Unplanned Joy

December 10, 2004: The Best Part of Snuggling

See Archives for past editorials.

Condoms: Context Counts

Jane Jimenez

January 10, 2005

Condoms have made front page news again this month. They have been tested. They have been ranked. They have been inflated and burst and charted, from high risk to low risk.

Once again, our discussion of condoms is boiled down to a statistical “failure rate” expressed as a measure of “strength and reliability.” These tests by Consumers Union will be reported February in Consumer Reports.

But buyer beware. It’s not the condom we must worry about. More important than the statistical reports of failure is the report of how…and where…these tests are conducted. Context counts.

In a well-lit laboratory, one by one, a laboratory tech unwraps each condom and follows a well-rehearsed, methodical, and uniform procedure to place the condom on sterile lab equipment and inflate it with air until it bursts. No STDs are present. No sperm, no emotions, no shadows, and no youthful inexperience will cloud the results.

Using the context of controlled laboratory “perfection,” some educators want us to believe we can rest assured that condoms will save our children from the consequences of sex. Touting statistics from laboratory tests, they say condoms “only fail” three percent of the time to prevent pregnancy.

If our children were stainless steel robots living in a germ-free laboratory, they might have a point. But they aren’t…and they don’t.

In the context of real life, measuring the failure of condoms in the shadows, in the heat of the moment, to prevent pregnancy, the statistics demonstrate time and again that context counts. Condoms fail to prevent pregnancy 13-15% percent of the time for real people outside of laboratories. And if the real people are teenagers, the failure rate can be as high as 22%.

In the context of germs…bacteria…and viral infections without cure…condoms are a veritable catastrophe waiting to happen. In the context of the real world, there are now over 25 different STDs, each with its own peculiar way of attacking the human body.

Speaking of only one of the 25 STDs, the virus that causes genital herpes lives on the body outside of areas covered by the condom. It can be present on the body even when no symptoms of the disease are present. This may help to explain why a disease largely unknown to the general population in the 1960s today infects one out of five people over the age of 12.

The context for condoms, considering genital herpes…and each of the other 25 STDs, is not mentioned by Consumer Reports. It’s not their fault. Real life doesn’t happen in a lab under bright lights with reliable machines and technicians.

The context for Consumers Union’s chart on condoms…in a magazine generally devoted to toasters, automobile radiator caps, and power drills…clouds the truth about condoms and why they fail. Condoms are not mechanical devices submitted to uniform stress. And when they fail, you don’t get to return the toaster for a refund.

The context for condom failure is magnified because it is the context of our life, here and now, and into the future. Twenty percent of our adult population now lives with genital herpes. Infertility now prevents couples from having the babies they desperately want, the result of STDs attacking the reproductive system. And each year, in numbers equal to death from AIDS, women die of cervical cancer which is linked to an STD at least 97% of the time.

The context for condom failure is magnified because it is the context of human hopes and dreams. Toasters don’t rejoice when they make perfect toast. And they don’t care if they explode and burn up. They are things. Their failure rates are cold numbers without feeling.

Failure rates for condoms touch the human heart. The context for condom failure, most especially for teens, is a crash and burn world where relationships last for months, weeks, days…or minutes. If love was never present, we have taught them sex is sport. And if love was present, it was the fleeting passion of youth that vanishes at the first sign of trouble or boredom.

When February comes and Consumer Reports hits the stands, step back a moment and remember. Condoms that fail in the lab are one thing. Condoms that fail in real life…that’s another thing. Context counts.

April 2, 2004: Sex Education: Spinning the Truth

See Archives for past editorials.

Only

Jane Jimenez

August 13, 2004

Abstinence only?

So what comes to mind when you hear abstinence only? Do you see fields of ostriches all with their fluffy feather fannies in the air and their heads burrowed deep into desert sand? If so, you have bought the big lie…the lie that says abstinence “only” is about ignorance.

Only abstinence? Fanning the flames of fear, opponents of abstinence education paint a picture of repressed prudes pointing fingers…wagging fingers…and saying over and over again, “No, no, no, don’t do it…abstain, abstain, abstain.”

Oh, the power of a four-letter word. ONLY. This is the thing. ONLY. This four letter word is at the heart of a vast fear-based campaign against abstinence education.

Should parents be afraid of abstinence-only sex education? Well…only if they don’t know what only means when someone says abstinence only.

Abstinence educators teach that abstinence is the only 100 percent effective method of preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, STDs. Did you year it? ONLY?

If not, it’s worth repeating: Abstinence is the only 100 percent effective method of preventing pregnancy and STDs.

Even the condom companies print this warning on their condom packages. Condoms fail. Manufacturers offer no money-back guarantees to anyone who puts their fate in their candy-flavored, color-coded condoms.

Abstinence educators know this. For this reason they believe in reinforcing this truth with information about sex…yes, sex. Abstinence educators talk about sex. All the time.

In a reality-based approach, these educators help parents by delivering the truth to our children about the risks of sex. And the joy of sex.

Yes, abstinence educators talk about the joy of sex that comes when students save sex for a committed marriage. They tell our children that they don’t have to be one of the statistics. If only young people will commit to abstinence before marriage, they will not be sentenced to a life of genital herpes…like the one in five of Americans over the age of twelve who are currently infected.

They point out that genital herpes is only one of over 25 sexually transmitted diseases that are part of the current epidemic of STDs. This is not “fear-based” information. This is the medically accurate information teens and parents need to have in order to consider intelligent choices about sex.

Abstinence educators aren’t embarrassed or afraid to talk about the value of sex. Yes, they tell our children, sex has value for your life. It is not a recreation designed to cure boredom or to boost your popularity.

Abstinence educators talk about the beautiful freedom of having sex with a husband or wife who will be there in a committed relationship. They discuss the common sense notion that marriage is the first step of family planning, when pregnancy can be celebrated and enjoyed.

They care enough about our children to analyze the lies and distortions of everyday television hits like Friends where a cast of six men and women engage in nine years of casual sex and never get an abortion or an STD. Amazing! If ONLY it were true!

Are these facts you want your children to understand? If so, abstinence educators are your best friends. This is not only an opinion. It is supported by research.

Research proves that the single most effective force for helping children remain sexually abstinent is parents. You! The parent! This matters a lot to abstinence educators. They take your values seriously and work hard to reinforce your values with information and truth.

Abstinence education. It is not only a message to abstain. It is a comprehensive message based on medically accurate information about the beauty of sex and planning your life to enjoy sex to the fullest…free from worries about pregnancy and disease.

The next time someone comes at you waving a flock of ostrich feathers and shrieking “ONLY abstinence”, remember what the “only” means. If you want your children to avoid pregnancy and STDs before meeting and marrying the love of their life…abstinence is the only guarantee.

Yes…the ONLY guarantee!

From the Home Front

DEFENDING THE FAMILY WITH ETERNAL TRUTH

Category Archives: Medical Issues

Does Abstinence Work?

All the Condoms in the World

The Pregnant Elephant in the Room

Condoms: Context Counts

Only