The Bush Baby Boom
Yet another report confirms, as The Guardian explains, "that rates of teen pregnancy and STDs are, after more than a decade of decline, once again on the rise." Thanks to President Bush's abstinence-only sex education agenda, black, Hispanic and poor women are more likely to have unwanted pregnancies.
Yet another report confirms, as The Guardian explains, “that rates of teen pregnancy and STDs are, after more than a decade of decline, once again on the rise.” Thanks to President Bush’s abstinence-only sex education agenda, black, Hispanic and poor women are more likely to have unwanted pregnancies.
Ironically, Bush’s policies could produce a boom of baby Democrats.
Not to make light of America’s tragic backsliding in this area. A surge of unwanted pregnancies will doubtlessly lead to a surge in abortions. And we know conclusively that abstinence-only sex ed spreads disease alongside ignorance.
This is one of the former president’s failures that deserve more attention. Abstinence-only sex education is still failing children across America.
Wait, before you go…Melissa McEwan in The Guardian:
The new CDC report notes that “Every effort was made to present the data in a consistent manner with regard to age groups, race/ethnicity, sex and geographic location,” leaving an explicit investigation of poverty out of the equation altogether – though its findings indicate that American teens whose race/ethnicity and/or geographic location suggest a greater likelihood of poverty are also the most likely demographic to have increased rates of unwanted pregnancy and STDs. Both pregnancy and Aids rates are higher among Hispanic and non-Hispanic black young women aged 15-19 than any other ethnic group. Chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis were highest among non-Hispanic black young women and men aged 10-24. And the southern states “tend to have the highest rates of negative sexual and reproductive health outcomes, including early pregnancy and STDs.”
The Bush-era insistence on catastrophically inefficacious abstinence-only programmes did not only see a race- and income-based divergence in its effects domestically, but internationally, too. Like the global gag rule, which restricted US government funding to NGOs that provided abortion counselling or services abroad, Bush’s much-lauded Pepfar (President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief) programme made a condition of its funding that one-third go to abstinence-only campaigns — though, in practice, fully “two-thirds of the money for the prevention of the sexual spread of HIV [went] to abstinence,” with tragic results among black and poor populations in Africa.
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