dr.rich swier: Fake news is alive and well — and thriving on the pages of America’s biggest newspapers. No wonder more people are tuning out the media. They don’t trust it. And outlets like the New York Times aren’t giving them any reason to try.At some point, the Times’s editorial board must have gotten together and decided to reprint every lie ever told about abstinence education. The result was Saturday’s work of fiction, a breathtakingly dishonest, 602-word crime scene of journalism that justifies America’s growing distrust of the press. About the only thing that was accurate about the column was its placement: on the opinion page, where it can’t be passed off as legitimate news.
Still, the editors’ agenda was obvious – discrediting a sex-ed approach that’s popular, effective, and grossly underfunded. They barely got the byline in before the absurdities began, starting with the Times’s insistence that HHS is somehow “advancing an anti-science, ideological agenda” by trying to level the funding field for abstinence. “The department last year prematurely ended grants to some teen pregnancy prevention programs, claiming weak evidence of success. More recently, it set new funding rules that favor an abstinence-only approach,” they complain.
If anyone’s ignoring science, it’s the Times. Barack Obama’s own HHS admitted outright that his contraception-first strategy was a billion-dollar failure. more
Peer pressure is the most effective policy with teens. When I was growing up, nobody wanted to be known as “the good time that was had by all”.
With the left’s open endorsement of all things detrimental and perverted, being a teen diseased producer of untold numbers of illegitimate children gets prom king and queen status.
More sick vomit from the NYT.
Rather than an absolutely fool-proof method, they promote one that is either mostly ignored or possibly ineffective.
“The kids are going to have sex anyway, trying to stop them is foolish”. 1960’s sex culture is alive and well. The result is a really effed up bunch of social norms.
There’s only been one time I can think of. where abstinence hasn’t worked.
Page O Turner, back in my day a girl got pregnant in school and before or when she started showing she was sent to homebound. She was the one nobody spoke about. Then it became so unkind to do that to a girl, punish her and not the boy, then she could stay in school up until the baby popped out. For awhile most still didn’t talk about it and avoided her, then teachers and staff started treating them like celebrities with the attention lavished on them.
So why would teen girls care to get knocked up when they see the attention and special treatment it gets them?
We should go back to making it an embarrassment to be a pregnant teen.
It’s true, the older practices may have been very hard on the pregnant teen but they sure kept the pregnancy rate low.