Do you ever read headlines and you interpret them as your failure? That's what I did when I read yesterday that 1 in 4 teenaged girls have a STD.
The overall STD rate among the 838 girls in the study was 26 percent,
which translates to more than 3 million girls nationwide, researchers
with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. They released the results Tuesday at an STD prevention conference in Chicago.
For once I have the same position as anti-sex ed folks - Parents must be the primary knowledge base for their children when it comes to sex. Of course I also think that school-based sexuality education is a good thing and must be medically correct without ***-shaming. ***-shaming goes like this - Jill has sex with John on Friday gets a STD and then has sex with Bill on Monday and gives it to him. Jill should have abstained from sex! Um....where did Jill get the STD? Oh, yeah...maybe John?
Thankfully the article I link to does mention the role that boys play in this apparent epidemic of STDs:
"This is pretty shocking," said Dr. Elizabeth Alderman, an adolescent medicine specialist at Montefiore Medical Center's Children's Hospital in New York.
"To talk about abstinence is not a bad thing," but teen girls — and
boys too — need to be informed about how to protect themselves if they
do have sex, Alderman said.
And even better than that, the article has a major focus on this rise in STD rates could be a direct result of abstinence only sex education.
"Those numbers are certainly alarming," said sex education expert Nora Gelperin, who works with a teen-written Web site called sexetc.org. She said they reflect "the sad state of sex education in our country."
Thankfully my daughter is only 4 1/2 and "the talk" is on the horizon. And I'm doubly thankful that I'll have Jennifer's wisdom to turn to when the time comes.
I also am not dumb enough to think that the teens having sex and getting STDs are doing this only because they have no idea what is going on. Teens are notorious for thinking that they can survive anything. Thus, I would like to think that anytime my daughter "fails" in life, I won't take it so personally. But I know otherwise.
When she's not wallowing in Mommy Guilt, Veronica blogs at Viva La Feminista, WIMN's Voices, Chicago Moms Blog and Work it, Mom!
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