There is a new abstinence program at my high school in the Bronx, which is supposed to be educating our already-sexually-inundated-students on the ways of just saying no. To attempt to isolate high school students growing up in the inner city for 45 minutes and negate all influences that saturate their other 23.25 hours of ad-mad hip hop envy lives is quite simply arrogant.
Anybody with any idea, the slightest clue as to the workings of the human mind and the drives and desires of adolescents would come to the rational conclusion that this is more than a waste of our students time, our class resources, and teachers patience. Hand out condoms. Teach kids the risks. And pray they make the right choice. Abstinence is a sham. No stranger coming into a class of adolescent strangers for 45 minutes is going to change any outlook or perspective on the most primal of human desires.
And now, the madness spreads to more impoverished peoples around the globe, courtesy of the global stewards of the century, The Bush Administration, who have stopped funding non-abstinence reproductive health NGO's in Africa and around the world. What a shameful, negligent act.
From Nicholas Kristof's Op Ed in the Times Thursday.
The Bush administration this month is quietly cutting off birth control supplies to some of the world’s poorest women in Africa...
Retrograde decisions on reproductive health are reached in conference rooms in Washington, but I’ve seen how they play out in African villages. A young woman lies in a hut, bleeding to death or swollen by infection, as untrained midwives offer her water or herbs. Her husband and children wait anxiously outside the hut, their faces frozen and perspiring as her groans weaken.
When she dies, her body is bundled in an old blanket and buried in a shallow hole, with brush piled on top to keep wild animals away. Her children sob and shriek and in the ensuing months they often endure neglect and are far more likely to die of hunger or disease.
In some parts of Africa, a woman now has a 1-in-10 risk of dying in childbirth. The idea that U.S. policy may increase that toll is infuriating.
