Friday, September 30, 2011
Phillips Would You Use a Form of Birth Control That Had an 80 Percent Failure Rate Among Its Most Ardent Users?
Posted by Betsy Phillips on Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 6:45 AM
Yes, a generation of abstinence-only education, True Love Waits and Purity Balls has told kids that the only sure way to keep from getting pregnant or getting some kind of STI is to just to not have sex until you get married. And yet, for some reason, they're still fucking.
This means that, as a method of birth control, abstinence has at least an 80 percent failure rate. If you do not have a more dependable form of birth control as a back-up, you are likely to get pregnant while using abstinence as your form of birth control.
Oh, I know. I practically hear your fingers inching towards your keyboards to say that of course abstinence fails if you don't actually abstain. To which I say: Yes — and demonstrably, even people who are strongly committed to remaining abstinent because they believe it's what God wants cannot do it.
It is a failure as a form of birth control or safe sex in general.
It's great that 20 percent of Christians and 12 percent of non-Christians can. Fine. But what about everyone else? Do they not deserve to know how to protect themselves and their partners from pregnancy and STIs?
Tennessee, under law, mandates teaching abstinence and morals. Why can't we just acknowledge human nature and teach kids many forms of protecting themselves, not just the one with the greatest failure rate?
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