And she would know:

81 replies on “Bristol Palin: Abstinence Education “Not Realistic””

  2. I think she sounded very young, ill prepared to be interviewed, and tired. I’m not sure sharing her story, and the story of other teen moms, will eliminate teen pregnancy alone.

  4. Oh. My. She has about 150 words in her vocabulary, and that’s only if you consider something still a word once you drop the G off of the end (“thanks for lettin’ me be here”).

    She’s clearly not bright, and it’s really a shame that she wants to have a house and education and didn’t want a baby right now. Yeah it was her choice, under pressure from her VP-campaignin’ mom.

  6. Abstinence is the only ‘program’ that, when followed, is 100% effective at preventing unwanted pregnancy and the spread of STDs.
    Every year millions of Americans successfully employ abstinence.
    It is not easy and is not for everyone but it is 100% effective.
    Even so everyone should know about other methods and be able to employ them when they are the most appropriate strategy.
    However the Left’s snarky derision of Abstinence serves society poorly.

    If there were another 100% effective pregnancy and disease prevention method that required a fairly complex compliance regieme ( 2 pills at 8am then 1 pill at noon then 3 pills at 5pm then 1 pill at 8pm…) and public health officials said; “yes it works but the average kid in the ghetto is too STUPID to take it right so we will only give them plan B which is 55% effective” there would be an outcry.
    But that is exactly what happens when Abstinense is belittled.

  8. @7: See, jumping back and forth between two different senses of the term “effective” is what’s causing the problem here. Obviously abstinence as practice is 100% effective, but as curriculum it has a demonstrated record of failure. The practice is worthless if people can’t be convinced to use it, which is clearly the case with horny teenagers the world over.

  10. @6: Never Leaving Your House is the only ‘program’ that, when followed, is 100% effective at preventing people getting run over by buses.

    Unfortunately, Never Leaving Your House isn’t a realistic or sensible way to approach the bus problem, and besides – NLYH deprives its practitioners of an awful lot of incidental joy in their lives.

  11. Sure, abstinence works in the context of #6, but what’s the point? Seriously, sex is fun, and sex – when handled maturely – can be quite an enjoyable hobby.

    There’s a reason why God – if there is one – made sex so fun for everyone (gay, straight, bi, whatever). He wanted us to enjoy it. It’s when we put irrational restrictions on it that we get perversions of what should be a natural, enjoyable activity.

    Teach the kids realistic birth control – just as my very Catholic parents did – and let nature work its course. There will still be teen pregnancy, of course – some kids romanticize the idea of having a baby, some have babies just to have someone to love who loves them back – but a lot of regular teens will be saved from a lifetime of missed opportunities if we would just be realistic about sex.

  12. @6: I smell a straw man. The issue the Snarky Left™ has is with abstinence ONLY education, not abstinence as a concept or the teaching of abstinence as part of comprehensive sex ed.
    The results of abstinence only education among teens is pretty conclusive at this point: higher rates of unplanned pregnancy, high rates of STDs.

  13. She’s alright. She’s just a kid. I feel for her. She’s in a loosing situation, and surrounded by people who want to turn her sad story into some kind of political flashpoint.

    She’s living proof that simplification of social policy for political gain wins votes, but ends up hurting those that it’s intended to protect. T.D. Jakes, you reading this?

  14. 7
    Greg, you should not let your personal situation cloud your judgement of what others are capable of.

    I teach and am raising teenagers (and actually was a teenager who successfully practiced abstinence).
    Millions make it work for them and it has a place.
    It requires support from family and the education process is a life-long one and it is not the kind of thing a counselor can teach teenagers in an hour and have it work.
    But it will be a central component in any informed program for helping people avoid unwanted pregnancy and STDs.
    The shortcoming is not with Abstinence as a strategy, it is with following the strategy.

    (it also is easy to know when it is failing; if you’re having sex IT AIN’T WORKING)

  15. @14: Show me a study which finds that abstinence-only education “works” – that it decreases rates of sexual activity, STIs, etc compared to a control group. You’ll be looking for a long time.

  16. Well. I am a teenager who is currently sexually active. I was taught about various forms of birth control/STI prevention. I am not pregnant and do not have any STI’s. My friend, who comes from a very religious background and who went to a religious school where abstinence was stressed as the only option, has had 2 abortions. That’s real life.

  17. Cllllllassic like, way of like saying it.

    “But uh, I think abstinence is like, like the, I don’t know how to put it, like, the main — everybody should be abstinent or whatever but it’s not realistic at all”

  18. @14-That sort of abstinence education is not the type I people object to, generally. Heck, my mom taught me about condoms and birth control well before I hit puberty, but she still said sex was something that ideally I should wait for until I was out of highschool and in lurve (which I did, for that matter). The objection is to teaching that sex is a horrible dirty perversion that they should only share with their one true love and that condoms/pills don’t work any way so if they can’t keep themselves pure they should just accept that their bits are going to rot off. THAT sort of abstinence ONLY education is what leads to A)sex being forbidden fruit and therefore even more alluring B) people engaging in ever riskier behavior like saddlebacking in the belief that if they only engage in anal sex they are somehow still “pure”
    C) kids relying on ridiculous urban legends for birthcontrol (like drinking a capful of bleach to protect against aids, or remaining standing up to prevent pregnancy) since condoms and pills ‘don’t work anyway D)teen pregnancy.

  19. @6 – What you say is true. And abstinence can be presented that way in the course of comprehensive sex education, including various methods of contraception/disease prevention. But it can’t be taught as the only way, because teenagers are going to have sex.

    I abstained in high school. But I was in a very small minority among my group of friends. We were taught all about birth control and about condoms in particular (this was the height of the AIDS scare in the late 80’s). Unfortunately, we weren’t taught until 11th grade (when my health teacher brought in a dildo and showed us how to put a condom on it). That was too late for quite a few girls in my class who already had kids, and asked in class, “Why didn’t they teach us this earlier?”

  21. Yeah people need to understand the difference between practicing abstinence, and “abstinence-ONLY education” which has been shortened to “abstinence.”

    Abstinence only education is a failure. Abstinence as a choice works fine, but people should be aware of other choices.

  23. Fact 1: Most teens will have sex no matter what you tell them. This is a biological imperative. It will happen. Do you understand? It cannot be changed in any way that is at all realistic on a large scale. It WILL happen.

    Fact 2: Having sex with proper precautions and forewarned with the best information is a whole lot safer than having sex ignorant of the risks involved and the best ways to mitigate them, especially since the latter circumstance only fosters a sense of guilt and fatalism which discourages the teens in question from bothering to seek out better information.

    Fact 3: If quality sex-ed programs don’t teach kids about sex, they will learn about it from word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth information among teens, for those of you who may not recall, is very, very low quality information.

    Teaching kids about the risks of sex and making sure they know that abstinence is the only sure protection is fine. Assuming that that alone is enough is ignorant and destructive.

    Incidentally, you remember that sense of guilt and fatalism I mentioned? If the only things you teach kids about sex are the risks and dangers, almost all of which are overhyped to some degree or another in our sex-phobic society (except pregnancy, which is by far the gravest risk but for some reason is considered exempt from being an unimitigated disaster, like, say, herpes, which may well never hurt you at all), those kids are just going to develop guilt complexes over wanting desperately to do something that they’ve been told is wrong and dangerous. One way or another that’s only going to result in an increase in risky behavior.

    Trust me. I know. Firsthand experience.

    In short: abstinence is fine if it’s your chosen method of protection. Education which features abstinence is fine. Education which features abstinence exclusively, or which promotes abstinence over all other choices, is destructive, denialist, and ethically indefensible.

  25. ‘Everyone should like wait ten years because it is so much easier.’

    I like how she is trying to get out the Republican Talking Points, but can’t manage to form them in her mind.

  28. I like how she says a couple times “I/we have a lot of growin’ up to do”. I can literally HEAR her mom saying that to her as a family talking point!

  29. i had sex education and im still a virgin by choice. just because school taught me about sex, it doesnt mean that im going to go out and fuck my brains out.

    sex ed just teaches you how to do it right, so you dont end up pregnant or with an STI. i’ve known people who have had the abstinence program and ironically, those people are the ones who ended up getting pregnant during their teens :/

  31. My main goal in life is to NOT do what my mom does. I graduated HS. I didn’t get married at 17, I didn’t have a child at 18. And I thought having sex with an idiot HS boy while I was still living with my parents would be THE stupidest thing I could do.
    Some kids figure their parents would help them out if anything bad happens, but, really, why would you want your parents to be more in your lives just when you’re about to get out of school and be on your own and out from under their control???
    Do you not want to be an adult?

  32. @6: Communism is the only program that, when followed, leads to a bright shiny future for all the peoples of the Earth. The shortcoming is not with Communism as a strategy, it is with following the strategy.

    @29: an STI? You get a sports car for having unprotected sex? What?

  33. 40-50% of kids abstain until after High School as it is. With a little support from the ‘popular culture’ (Hollywood, music industry, etc) that figure could easily increase.

  35. OK, I’m sick and tired of hearing the “motherhood is so rewarding line”

    It’s a half/to mostly lie, a blanket mindless statement, it’s pseudo rehearsed, (and they avoid eye and I bet any young mother more or less forced in the situation would give their kidney to do it over again to do it differently! Yet nobody is ever allowed to “say” that. Yet they may know intentially feel that. They are conflicted, warped, and moving from one mood swing to the next.

    I have this belief that forced parenting is a traumatic situation, sort of like Stockholm syndrom. Remember anyone who understands human emotion knows that love and hate are not opposites and that emotions, espeically extreme emotions are just chemicals being sent around the brain. (I hate to invalidate your emotions people, but realize your perspective on anything can change with emotion behind it!) Young forced mothers are being held in essentially a captive situation just starts to oscilate these things back and forth. Brings about these chemical mood swings, which are pushed even further by maternal instincts, creates a very warped and dangerous dynamic. Especially as the child gets older, and the whole new mom smell wears off … the feeling of resentment gets stronger and stronger, and more and more damaging.

    And people will still celebrate new life! In the presense of seething and subtle and persistant passive aggression. Every god damn woman I know had children too young or under god aweful circumstances had to come to terms with this resentment, and 95% of the time not before it damages the child.

    And to the abstinence only preachers! We live in a complex society where it takes most of until our late 20s to establish ourselves. We can’t just put our urges on hold to only have sex when we are 28 or 35. Some of us can, but they are the vast minority. The majority who are incapable damage society by brining children in the world that they can’t support.

  36. Let me just play the parent card here for a second.

    I have a daughter rapidly heading toward the teen years. She is a mature, capable, and confident girl. But my wife and I *will* have some say in the decisions she makes about whether or not to get sexually active as a teen. There are a lot of scummy people out there, and her good nature and eagerness to bring happiness to the world could easily be manipulated into horrible sexual experiences.

    If my daughter handles high school well and learns how to navigate the tricky dating scene, then if she comes to us and says, say, that she wants to get on birth control we’ll almost certainly support that.

    But if she dips her little toe into the dating scene and starts having bad experiences, we will probably try to slow things down and encourage her to proceed slowly and err on the side of patience.

    I don’t pretend that my wife and I can make our daughter do what we want- she will grow and become more independent, and at some point if she’s hell bent on fooling around despite our wishes, she will. But parents have a role in helping their kids get through adolescence with a minimum of trauma, and sometimes that means encouraging abstinence, and sometimes it means filling a prescription at Walgreens.

    In no cases does it mean supporting a school policy that preaches an ineffective and discredited “abstinence only” policy that doesn’t take into account the nature of the individual kid nor indeed the nature of adolescence.

  37. @6: The problem with abstinence only education is that it has no back ups. Sure it works, when people practice it. Abstinence worked fine for me when I was a kid. But when some people don’t practice it for whatever reason (and there will ALWAYS be those who don’t), they’re left with no knowlege of how to prevent disease or pregnancy.

    Interestingly enough, I had always received full sex education. It actually gave me a better understanding of the risks involved, even with protection, much better than abstinence “education” would have.

  40. I was dogmatized in the abstinence only school of thought. I saved sex for my husband, who turns out to be terribly bed in bed. I started having an affair three years into our marriage. Abstinence only education not only doesn’t work, but can be damaging. I spend a lot of time regretting the fact that I didn’t have more sex when I had the opportunity.

  41. I would rather have kids fucking each other senselessly on the playground, safely, with protection, than having the youth of America bring in children with means of supporting them, and giving them no viable future.

    Personally, I mean, dollars and cents … Religious people, are your principles worth THAT much to you? Complain about taxes, complain about welfare etc. etc. Which inevitably stubborn conservative pride costs you more money by preaching abstinence! This is an issue that at the end of the day effects the functioning of an industrial society, and our pocketbook.

  48. Even if kids are encouraged to wait they should still get good sex-ed. One of the main problems with absinence-only as opposed to actual sex-ed is that the former creates a huge population of people who know nothing about reproductive health. Since most schools are teaching “just say no” kids are not getting the info they need to become good parents or plan their families when they are actually ready to have them. Bristol even brings that up. Also, under this silence-is- better policy, the HPV vaccine program is not reaching the population who need it to be effective. There is so much that needs to be taught and it isn’t happening.

  49. @45,
    Girls are often told not to touch themselves “down there” because it’s unclean and unhealthy. Maybe they should be taught the truth instead?
    @47,
    At least they won’t be as pent up as a 16 year old boy who thinks of nothing but how much he wants bang every chick (or dude) in his school but is told there’s nothing he can do but wait wait wait until that magical golden wedding day (although if he wants the guys, I guess he just waits forever).

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