The Abstinence Clearinghouse Blog

Dr. James Dobson has a new book ‘Bringing Up Girls’ as a resource for parents, grandparents and teachers to “equip you to raise girls to become successful women who can deal wisely with the challenges they’ll face in our turbulent world.”

Check it out here:

http://links.mail-family.org/servlet/MailView?ms=MzA0MjE2MwS2&r=MjQzNjUxMzMyMQS2&j=OTI0MTM1NjAS1&mt=1&rt=0 

By Todd Starnes

Parents are outraged after young teenagers were instructed on graphic sexual acts during a Planned Parenthood sex education class at the local high school in Shenandoah, Iowa.

“It was horribly inappropriate,” Colleen Dostal told Fox News Radio. “To do that in a mixed-gender classroom, — I truly believe it was inappropriate.”

Dostal’s 14-year-old son was one of a handful of eighth graders in the class. The students, she said, were given instruction on how to perform female exams and the instructor used a 3-D, anatomically correct male sex organ to explain how to use a condom.

But Dostal said she was most upset over the instructor simulating sexual acts using stuffed animals designed to resemble STD’s.

“I do not understand why any adult with a classroom of children would show them sexual positions,” she told Fox News Radio. “I think that’s horribly inappropriate.”

As for the photographs, “I believe some of those photos were pornographic,” she said.

“Had we known this was going on, I would have sat in the classroom or I would have pulled him out,” Dostal said.

She took her concerns to the principal, who Dostal said was “mortified.” The principal apologized but several other parents decided to take the issue to the school superintendent.

“I understand it’s a state law that sex education be taught but it is also state mandated that parents be told that this is going to happen and we were not told.”

Superintendent Dick Profit told the World Herald he received an equal number of calls supporting and opposing the Planned Parenthood presentation.

“It’s a political hot potato; it’s a religious hot potato; it’s a parental hot potato,” he told the newspaper. “It’s all of these things that cause a crack in the system between society, parents and schools, and we’re still required to do it.”

Planned Parenthood’s Jennifer Horner defended the class and said some of the material had been turned around. 

“We are not trying to keep any of this a secret,” Horner told the newspaper. “All information we use is medically accurate and science based.”

Profit said next year parents and guardians will receive advanced warning about the class.
But that may not satisfy parents like Scott Gray, whose 16-year-old son was in the class.

“As far as we were concerned, it wasn’t sex ed, it was sex demonstration,” he told the World Herald

Source:  FoxNews.Com

Many people today engage in sexual activity without hesitance. There are some very good reasons to wait until you are married. Here are but a few:

1. Marriage is the most significant relationship in your life. There are stories of people being married 70 and 80 years. This is a lifetime! Your spouse will be the most important person in your life. You must choose wisely and treat that relationship (even if it hasn’t started yet) with respect. Your future spouse will value this.
2. The time between now and your marriage is relatively short compared to the rest of your life. Abstinence shows your willingness to exercise self-control and good judgment.
3. Sex in a relationship creates an artificial intimacy that exposes you to being hurt. It implies respect, honesty, trust and caring but it delivers none of it.
4. Saving sex for marriage frees your marriage from thoughts and experiences with other people
5. Saving sex for marriage allows your spouse to be totally free from thoughts and experiences of you with other people
6. By saving sex for marriage, you make the statement that sex is special and that your spouse will never have to worry about you looking outside your marriage for sex. That creates a stronger bond and more intimacy that you can ever know outside of marriage
7. Abstinence will help you become the right girl for the right guy. The right guy is happy to wait. He is not looking for a quick squeeze. He is looking for someone who will instill good values in his children. Anyone who would not respect your decision in this area will not respect your decisions in other areas.
8. Zero chance of pregnancy and being forced into stressful and life changing decision making
9. Zero chance of contracting curable venereal diseases and pubic parasites
10. Zero chance of contracting incurable viruses such as HPV, herpes and AIDs
11. Exclusive dating is not a commitment. A commitment is a contract before God and society that establishes a bond for life and that you are in all things - good or bad - together.
12. Marriage includes many difficulties and crises including pregnancy, child-rearing, work stress, money problems, and ageing parents. Sex during dating can take on importance so far beyond its actual impact during the most important relationship in your life. Sex also diverts time and emotion away from the most important part of dating: getting to know one another and objectively evaluating the other’s suitability for a continued relationship.

The drive to reproduce is very strong. It is important to develop a plan to help you in sticky situations. Some of the keys to keeping your commitment to yourself are to find people who support your values, to brainstorm on nonphysical ways to show love and affection, to willingly share your values with others and to avoid situations which might prove to be tempting.

Even if you have engaged in sexuality in the past, it’s never too late to revise your position. When you communicate your new sexual code of behavior to people in your life, expect varied reactions from derision and ridicule to new found respect. Your true friends will support you. The most important thing to remember is that you are starting to respect yourself and your future. When the right person comes along and the time is right, you will know that sexuality within the context of your marriage is a precious gift you can share with one another.

Source:  bestarticle.org

Provincetown, MA, school board voted unanimously on a new condom distribution policy in their school.  Guess what it is! Free condom distribution at the elementary (Veterans Memorial Elementary) and high school.  Gretchen Carlson addressed their decision on the Bill O’Reilly show.  “This is the most outrageous thing I’ve ever heard,” Carlson declared. “Usually parents can opt out of the program, but in this case the parents have absolutely NO say.  Give me a break!”  Watch for more updates on this story.

http://billoreilly.com/show?action=viewTVShow&showID=2626#5

While families across America are struggling to make ends meet, our government is handing out millions of dollars to pro-abortion organizations. This week, we caught a glimpse of just how much it’s costing us.

A new Government Accountability Office report calculated how much federal money six pro-abortion groups spent from 2002 to 2009. The figure — more than $1 billion — is astounding. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Even the GAO acknowledged their own $1 billion figure “may understate the actual amount of federal funds the selected organizations and their affiliates spent.” The figure doesn’t even include state and local funding or money given to one entity and passed on to another.

You can read the full report for yourself. The six groups reviewed were:

• International Planned Parenthood Federation: $93.8 million
• Planned Parenthood Federation of America : $657.1 million
• Population Council of the United States: $284.3 million
• Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States: $1.6 million
• Advocates for Youth: $8.7 Million
• Guttmacher Institute: $12.7 Million

Theoretically, these groups cannot directly spend federal dollars on elective abortions. In practicality, the money still supports their work in promoting abortion — freeing up other resources to keep the death mills churning. (You might say: we’re paying the rent, so they can pay the abortionists.) These are huge subsidies, and without them the abortion industry could not be as effective in its deadly practice as it is today.

But Americans have made it very clear that we do not want our tax dollars to fund the slaughter of unborn babies. So stop sending our money to the groups that promote and perform them! That’s what the proposed Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act (H.R. 614) would do, and with 93 bipartisan co-sponsors behind the bill, we’re hopeful it will garner enough attention to succeed. Please let your U.S. Representative know you support the legislation. I, for one, can think of about a billion reasons to vote “yes.”

Source:  Life Issues Institute

Jason Halbert’s article , “How Foundations Can Help Curb Rising Teenage-Pregnancy Rates”, Opinion , April 8,  is about half right concerning the increasing rates of teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

Sadly, the rates are increasing.

However, Mr. Halbert’s elation over the proposed shift in federal funding seems to have skipped over some very important facts. He claims that “after more than 10 years of exclusively financing programs to teach teenagers that “abstinence until marriage” is the only method to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection, Congress has provided $114.5-million for programs that have already been proven effective or that show promise of innovation.”

Even during the heyday of the Bush administration’s abstinence program, comprehensive sex-education programs were running in parallel and were much better funded. The words “exclusive” and “only” are a poor fit for describing the Bush abstinence programs. The Department of Health and Human Services has shown that for every $1 spent on abstinence programs, $4 was spent on comprehensive sex education.

One might surmise that a program that was well funded and “proven effective” would have produced a decline or at least a leveling in teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, but just the opposite is taking place (i.e., the rates are rising).

The advocates for comprehensive sex education are quick to claim that abstinence programs don’t work; but they, as well as the news media, have a tendency to overlook the increasing body of published evidence that shows otherwise. They were shocked in February when results of a new study appeared in a prestigious American Medical Association journal showing that abstinence education works.

Even the most authoritative advocate of teenage sexual education would have to admit that the only program that has been proven 100 percent effective has been one of total abstinence. All other programs have shown varying degrees of success, and many are outright failures.

Given the uncertain outcomes and the heavy societal costs of the existing comprehensive sex-education programs, it would seem foolish to abandon any program that has shown as much promise as has been demonstrated by the abstinence programs.

James E. Budde
Kansas City, Mo.

Source:  Letter to the Editor – The Chronicle for Philanthropy.com

By C. Brent Boles, M.D.

The con­clu­sion of the recent CDC report show­ing the finan­cial and soci­etal bur­den stem­ming from teen sex­ual activ­ity should have been no sur­prise to any­one. As a prac­tic­ing ob/gyn, I see the adverse con­se­quences of sex­ual activ­ity out­side of mar­riage on a daily basis.

I once sat and counted 100 con­sec­u­tive patients who pre­sented to my office for appoint­ments. Had they all avoided sex until mar­riage, only 40 of them would have needed appoint­ments. The other 60 were being seen for preg­nancy and were not mar­ried or were being seen for the phys­i­cal and/or emo­tional con­se­quences of sex­u­ally trans­mit­ted dis­eases and bro­ken rela­tion­ships.

The ben­e­fits of absti­nence are unde­ni­able. One does not need to be a Chris­t­ian to under­stand that the absti­nent teen who waits until mar­riage will never get an STD and will never become preg­nant out of wedlock.

Absti­nence has other ben­e­fits, as well. A recent sur­vey of sex­ual sat­is­fac­tion in Amer­ica showed that the most sex­u­ally sat­is­fied Amer­i­cans were mar­ried Chris­tians. Another study shows that the divorce rate among Chris­tians who were vir­gins on the day of their wed­ding is only 3 per­cent. Sex­u­ally activ­ity in ado­les­cents is an inde­pen­dent risk fac­tor for depres­sion and attempted sui­cide. These teens are two to three times as likely to have depres­sion and three to seven times as likely to attempt sui­cide when com­pared to absti­nent teens.

The last four decades of “com­pre­hen­sive sex edu­ca­tion’’ and “values-neutral edu­ca­tion’’ have been a dis­mal fail­ure. The CDC report doc­u­ments that STDs remain as a prob­lem among teens, and Ten­nessee is 10th in the nation in terms of teen preg­nancy. A recent study shows that even those com­pre­hen­sive pro­grams that reduce unpro­tected sex and delay onset of sex­ual behav­ior have very short-lived effects, and their impact does not extend beyond six months.

Don’t teach bad behaviors

A study pub­lished in the Archives of Pedi­atric and Ado­les­cent Med­i­cine fol­lowed 662 African-American mid­dle school stu­dents from four pub­lic schools. The study eval­u­ated the stu­dents over a three-year period and com­pared an abstinence-only pro­gram with a pro­gram that taught only safe sex and a pro­gram that taught both. The abstinence-only pro­gram also cov­ered STDs, and only 33 per­cent of the stu­dents in that pro­gram became sex­u­ally active dur­ing the study.

About 52 per­cent of the stu­dents in the safe-sex arm of the study became active, and 42 per­cent of the com­bined group became active.

Inter­est­ingly, the abstinence-only cur­ricu­lum also did not reduce con­dom use in those teens who chose to be active. Many crit­ics have claimed that abstinence-only pro­grams reduce con­dom use among those stu­dents who are active. Other stud­ies con­cur with these findings.

Our schools are com­mit­ted to edu­cat­ing stu­dents about the dan­gers of cig­a­rettes, alco­hol and drugs. A myr­iad of pro­grams exist to show teens the con­se­quences of these behav­iors. To my knowl­edge, none of these pro­grams teach stu­dents how to inhale cig­a­rette smoke “safely.’’ None teach teens how to pace alco­hol con­sump­tion in order to keep their blood-alcohol lev­els below 0.8. They don’t teach stu­dents how to roll a joint prop­erly or how to shoot up with clean nee­dles. Such pro­grams focus on avoid­ing such behav­iors alto­gether, as they should.

It is time we rec­og­nize that the pub­lic health prin­ci­ple of pri­mary pre­ven­tion — risk avoid­ance instead of risk reduc­tion — should apply to sex education.

C. Brent Boles, M.D., is a mem­ber of the Chris­t­ian Med­ical and Den­tal Asso­ci­a­tion, is in pri­vate prac­tice in Murfrees­boro, and is the chief of ob/gyn at Mid­dle Ten­nessee Med­ical Cen­ter. He is also the Affil­i­ate Res­i­dency Pro­gram Direc­tor for the depart­ment of ob/gyn at the Meharry School of Medicine.

Souce:   Tennessean.com

If you are as much a believer in abstinence as I am, take a look at this great blog written by Cheryl.  She certainly makes many valid points.  Abstinence still works every time!

Happy meets Crazy - http://cherylthoughts.blogspot.com/

Not long ago I wrote about “Little Girls Going Hard on Single Ladies”; five, seven-year-old girls doing their provocative rendition of Beyoncè’s “Single Ladies” video.  I still think that their performance was over-the-top; but, if you can believe it, the exploitation of this three-year-old in her YouTube music performance entitled “Baby Gaga” is even worse! 

The mother of this little girl stated in an interview that the spoof on Lady Gaga’s video Telephone, “suited my daughter’s personality; she’s energetic, playful, and outgoing.  She wasn’t under stress but comfortable with the director since she has known him since she was 6-months-old.  It was for fun; just for our family and friends.  I had no idea it would go viral and be such a hit.”

 Okay, I take exception with most of this. 

1.  No matter how animated your three-year-old child might be, I don’t think one day she decides today is the day she is going to have fun getting in and out of risqué costumes, applying tons of makeup, donning handcuffs and wigs, playing like she’s sucking a bottle and sharing it with a grown up, dancing on a bar, have scantily-clad grown dancers gyrate in the background, and everything else that appears in this video.  This all goes a great deal beyond a little girl “playing dress-up” as the director stated was what Keira liked to do for fun.

2.  Secondly, how many people spend three hours making an elaborate video just for family and friends?  I’m sure, though it wasn’t mentioned, there were some costs associated with the costumes, extra dancers (unless they were dubbed in), etc.  I can’t imagine that this was posted without the idea that it would get hit after hit and go viral.  Asked why they didn’t take it down, “It’s too late,” said the mother. “It’s on all kinds of videos. It’s beyond YouTube.”  Exactly my point!

Again, how can you do this and not fear for the physical safety of your child?  How can you do this and not worry about emotional flashbacks for your child – not today but at sometime in the future.  Is it just another parent looking at life as if it is a “reality show” and they are immune from any type of consequences?   

People have to start realizing that “fun” can turn into tragedy and children should be allowed to just be children.

Recently, a police department in British Columbia sent out a warning to parents regarding the usage of Facebook by older high school boys to invite pre-teen girls to LG Parties or “Little Girl Parties”.  The premise of such parties is to lure these young girls to a party, get them drunk and sleep with them.

At the time the warning went out, the police department did not have anyone under investigation but they had heard enough rumors from students about such activity in their area that they felt it warranted putting out the information.  One parent and one male student complained to the district that the subsequent media coverage had “tarnished” the reputation of the older boys.

I wonder if these parents or the male student happened to have a pre-teen daughter or sister.  If there was even the slightest evidence that this was happening, wouldn’t they want to know so they could protect loved ones?  As a representative of the department said, “I’d much prefer to err on the side of caution.”

All of us are aware that most middle-school girls would feel flattered by the attention of an older boy.  Many of them wouldn’t think that they were the object of a Facebook predator intending to do them harm and would gladly accept the invitation.  Unfortunately, this is yet another example of today’s culture.

 A school district in the area posted a list of the following tips for parents:

• If your kids are going to a party, call ahead to ensure parental supervision at the party.
• Don’t allow your kids to use the family computer in private.
• Be aware of their Facebook contacts and the content of that contact
• Educate kids on the risks involved in drinking underage and the lack of judgment that goes along with be intoxicated.

 Great advice for parents to share with their children!

Source: News1130.com; CANWEST News Service; TheProvince.com