Do you want to know something….startling? Something scary? Something that should ignite fear, and possibly congressional action?

 

Nearly half of HIV-infected youth are completely unaware of their status.

 

According to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 22 percent of sexually active high school students are tested for human immunodeficiency virus. I can enumerate reasons why many students opt not to get tested. It could be one of two reasons:

 

1.)    The student may not believe there is a need to get tested.

2.)    The student may feel ashamed if they opt to get tested. It might make them feel like a “whore” or a “player”. After all, the only people who need to get tested are the ones having risky sex with multiple partners, right?

 

Why would youth feel ashamed of getting tested? Why should youth divert their attention from their sexual health to purity balls? This garbage that our conservative society feeds us needs to be justified by facts and statistics. In reality, all abstinence-only education provides are arguments questioning the morality of intercourse before marriage. It also feeds us misinformation about our sexuality. Why then does the federal government continue to fund this ineffective education?

 

In 2004, Congressman Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) released a report that provided several examples of inaccurate information being included in federally funded abstinence-only sex education programs. This report justified our claims, that abstinence-only programs deprive teenagers of critical information about sexuality.

 

In the report, some of the errors included: misrepresenting the failure rates of contraceptives, false claims that abortion increases the risk of infertility, premature birth for subsequent pregnancies, and ectopic pregnancy, treating stereotypes about gender roles as scientific fact, other scientific errors, e.g. stating that "twenty-four chromosomes from the mother and twenty-four chromosomes from the father join to create this new individual" (the actual number is 23).

 

So, if Congress has already identified the ineffectiveness of abstinence-only education, why are our tax dollars still being allocated to it?

 

The scariest part of it all?

Food for thought.