I'm a firm believer in absinance. I also live in the real world. Our kids need to know that abstinance is the only 100% effective way of preventing std's and pregnancy. They also need to be taught other methods to prevent disease and pregnancy. Why would they lie to our kids? Just wondering.

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Diana,

I also agree that abstinence is an important part of sex ed. I would suggest that a motive to inflate the apparent harms of sexual activity (their motive for lying) is to scare kids out of having sex. If more accurate numbers were used, sex may appear more appealing and the program would be less successful at deterring sexual activity.
At least initially, it appears that their motives to inflate such statistics are for short-term gains in decreasing youth sexual activity.

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You know, Diana, I read an interesting take on abstinence-as-BC a while back.

Every birth control method has two success rates. It has a lab success rate (what happens under ideal circumstances) and a real-life success rate (what happens in the real world).

If every time you have PiV sex you put the condom on before having sex, and your condoms are never expired and not kept under heat or pressure (say, in your back pocket), and you don't hang out for a bit after the guy ejaculates - they have a very high success rate in preventing pregnancy and the spread of disease!

In the real world, people don't always do these things. In the real world, people who rely on condoms as birth control, or to prevent disease sometimes don't use condoms. And when they get sick or pregnant, this is considered, by abstinance-only-advocates, to be a failure of the condom instead of simple human error.

But if you use abstinence as your main method of birth control, but one day slip up and decide, in the heat of the moment, to have sex anyway, and you get pregnant, instead of attributing this to a failure of abstinence (which would be consistent), you're suddenly lumped into the category of people who used no birth control method at all.

But you did. You used abstinence, right up until human fallibility poked its ugly head in and you had sex - and many of these kids do this with no backup plan "just in case".

What this all boils down to is that, while the "laboratory success rate" of abstinence is pretty damn near perfect, the "real world success rate", as statistics shows... kinda sucks.

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Personally, I only needed to hear that I had ANY chance of getting pregnant or an STD, and that convinced me to conduct myself in such a way that no guy thought he had any hope of "getting" anything with me. Yes, fear was my best friend in the sex ed department.

Even if the possibility of BC failure were miniscule, I would not be willing to risk it. There was too much at stake - my education, my health, the respect of my family, my freedom to determine the course of my adult life, my ability to respect myself.

Why are we always focusing on percentages? Why do kids think that even a 1% risk of pregnancy (or whatever) is acceptable? Are we not teaching kids to think about what is involved in becoming a teen parent or getting certain STDs? Or are we blase about it because we can always send them off for an abortion (though that doesn't cure aids, as far as I know)?

Furthermore, the statistics that are reported don't tell the whole story in any case. For example, the "success" rates of condoms include all the times when the female partner wasn't fertile anyway (i.e., most of the days of any month). Statistics are not objective. There is always an agenda behind the way they are computed and the way they are reported. I wouldn't teach my kids to rest their safety on some statistic.

If we really want to protect our kids from risks, we should focus on the real magnitude of those risks, not the % of times when other folks got lucky. If it's your child that falls into the allegedly small % of BC failures, it's not going to be much comfort to hear that the odds were statistically in their favor.

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