by Millie Mardahay
 Lets talk about sex. The word is only three letters long and yet it describes the most important act in human history. More important than dancing, sleeping, eating and drinking. It is more important than fresh air and clean bed sheets, although when it comes to sex, clean bed sheets definitely help.
We exist because of sex. So why is it that every time when someone whispers “sex!” we make like an ostrich and stick our head in the sand? It used to be that sex was the favorite activity in the town. People had it everywhere: in the cave, on the rocks, on the beach, in your next cave neighbor’s haystack. Sex was great. It was rich, unabashed, sweet and full of calories. It was the milkshake of the desserts, and it was good.
Then religion was invented and sex went diet. It was stripped of its glamour, texture and taste. The diet sex was meant to be consummated only from a certain age, in specific locations and only with permission from the third party. That left a large population of people, specifically teenagers, clandestinely enjoying the original sex which by now became contaminated with chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis and herpes; not to mention the teenage mutant ninja virus: HIV.
Sexually Transmitted Infections only being a part of the problem, suddenly there was an epidemic of teen girls having babies. Anti-abortion propaganda goes hand in hand with abstinence-only programs; so the number of teen pregnancies skyrocketed and the state found itself in the middle of the social and health crisis. The government responded by removing standard sex-ed classes from public school and instead introduced abstinence-only “educational” programs, which were designed to scare teenagers into not having sexual intercourse. Ten years later it was discovered that these programs did absolutely bubkes, nada, zilch, nothing from preventing teens from enjoying a little hanky-panky here and there.
Hence, we come to a document numbered A2856 in the New York State Assembly, known publicly as the Healthy Teens Act. What this bill intends to do is to establish an age-appropriate sex education grant program through the Department of Health. Specifically, the bill intends to allocate the money reserved for abstinence-only programs to school districts, education services, health centers, and community based organizations that provide comprehensive sex education programs, which includes prevention of unwanted pregnancies and occurrences of sexually transmitted diseases.
Abstinence is part of such education and a definite choice of disease and pregnancy prevention, but it is not the only one. With over $12 million of federal money spent annually on the abstinence-only programs, New York State boasts the highest occurrence of teenage pregnancies with 40,000, trailing only Texas. It did not help the matter when it was found that an overwhelming number of these abstinence-only programs were taught by religious organizations that lacked in medical accuracy and were not monitored by the state.
Although the overall occurrence of teen pregnancies has been in decline since the early 90s, it had little to do with abstinence and more to do with the fact that teens were more aware of the dangers of unprotected sex. What abstinence programs failed to achieve was to prevent teens from having sex, because as it became clear in the recently released statistics, not only do teens continue to have sex, they do it ignorantly and without proper protection. Alarmingly, the number of teens with an STI is one in four. As quoted from a positional paper published in the Journal of Adolescent Health: “providing ‘abstinence only’, or ‘abstinence until marriage’ messages as a sole option for teenagers is flawed from scientific and medical ethic viewpoint”. More disturbing is the fact that these abstinence programs do not take into account and discriminate against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender teens for whom the term “traditional marriage” doesn’t apply, since the federal law does not recognize non-heterosexual couples in most states.
The Healthy Teens Act is not a novelty in Albany. For past four years it has been passed in the Assembly with strong bi-partisan support, but was killed in the Senate. It is time that the New York State Senate recognizes the public health concern and does something about it.
The Healthy Teens Act includes provisions that award 80% of funds to programs conducted by public school districts; pay special attention and award accordingly grants to communities with high incidences of adolescent pregnancies, adolescent parents, number of STI and HIV/AIDS cases, the high school drop-out rate and other data indicating economic and social disadvantage or need.
An eligible program under the Healthy Teens Act will include information that is age-appropriate and medically accurate, provide information about health benefits and side effects of all contraceptives and other methods of pregnancy prevention, encourage family communication about sexuality, provide knowledge and skills that encourage teens to practice healthy lifestyle not only in respect to their sexuality but also goal-setting, decision making and communication, help teens gain knowledge about their physical, biological and hormonal changes, promote self-esteem and positive interpersonal skills focusing and relationship skills and show the importance of abstinence while not isolating teens who have already had sexual intercourse.
For more information about the Healthy Teens Act please visit www.getfactsny.org.
For information about family planning and to learn about methods of pregnancy prevention visit www.plannedparenthood.org
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