Sex education programs are not wrong, they teach consequences
March 7, 2009Eric Ariel Salas
Eric Ariel Salas, Foreign Eyes
In a third-world country where people breed like rabbits, causing the population to grow to tens of thousands each year, anyone who knows the facts and figures must worry about the future state of the Philippines.
The Department of Education attempted, at the start of classes last year, to bring forward to the whole country the program on “sex education.” The program was seen as a positive step by the United Nations Population Fund. It was supposedly integrated into the general curriculum, beginning in the fifth grade, via subjects like health, Filipino, science and livelihood education. This way, schools could help bottle up the issue of overpopulation and educate students on the dangers of pre-marital sex, including “unwanted pregnancies.” However, everything went down the drain.
Early in the program’s trial run, the Philippine government scrapped sex education due to the strong defiance by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines. The CBCP believes that such programming, when incorporated into the public schools, would persuade teenagers to undertake premarital sex rather than remain abstinent, and emphasizes that sex education is the parents’ responsibility and not the government’s.
The problem is that the government cannot go against the church. In the Philippines, whatever the church says, the clergy will follow. It happened during the great revolution in 1986 when late dictator President Marcos’ regime was overthrown by the people power revolt, after all-out support from the church. With about 85 percent Catholics, the setting would look like this: If you plan to be re-elected to office, never go against what the church considers right, otherwise you will lose a majority of the masses’ votes.
While others quote the article of the Philippine constitution regarding the provision of the separation of powers between the church and the state, many others proclaim that the church must play a role, the advocate of morality. It is indeed a very complicated situation with all the clashing ideas from two, big social entities.
I am a devout Christian myself, but I am for sex education. Sex education in itself is not evil, nor is it the enemy here. I am for it for as long as it is properly taught in schools and not “sugar-coated.” The Department of Education must come up with the right curriculum or an educational program with the right amount of sensitivity that will really hit the issue, bull’s-eye! Most importantly, teachers must also be capable of imparting it to young minds. Isn’t it high time to make everyone face the facts about sex and sexuality?
Sex education is not only about controlling population. It also educates the people on the consequences of pre-marital sex. I agree with one of my friends’ comments, “What will a conservative country do when it’s in the brink of economic disaster due to overpopulation and other things that go with it?” Sex education must not be equated to “Kama Sutra,” because it isn’t about learning the techniques of making love. Nor it is about reaching the perfect orgasm. Not at all.
If only the government and the church could join hands for once - the former through implementing the social welfare policies and the latter by continuing its feeding and housing programs for the poor - then, hopefully in the end, a better solution that would be fair for both sides could be reached. It must be a solution that’s beneficial for all.
So, is the government right in scrapping sex education from the education system? The answer could be felt when there is not enough resources for every Filipino in the country anymore.
Philippines Scraps Sex Education in Schools After Catholic Opposition
Manila, Philippines, June 19, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Filipino government has backed off from its trial run of sex education on account of the strong resistance by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines. The government had distributed the program to two areas of Metro Manila as part of the “pilot stage” of the Department of Education’s attempt to introduce it to the whole country.
The government was testing the reception of integrating the sex-education program into the general curriculum, including it among such subjects as health, Filipino, science, and livelihood education. In what the United Nations Fund for Population Activities called a positive step, the integration of sex education would have required teachers to educate about overpopulation and the dangers of pre-marital sex, including “unwanted pregnancies”.
“We are not tolerating pre-marital sex. We do not even encourage this. What we are doing is telling them the consequences of such acts and what should be done,” said the education department’s Acting Secretary Fe Hidalgo about the sex education program, which would begin in 5th grade.
Hidalgo maintained that the purpose of including sex education in the country’s high schools was for educating young adults on “their physical, mental, and social well-being”, and that the goal of the instruction of youth in the matters of sex, and the proper use of condoms and contraceptives was indeed “to discourage rather than encourage the act.”
However, the Filipino Bishops have objected that the introduction of sex education into the public schools would encourage teenagers to try premarital sex rather than remain abstinent, and emphasized that sex education is the parents’ responsibility, not the government’s. On top of that, the sex education program instructs youth in the use of artificial contraceptives and condoms, which stridently violate the Church’s solemn teachings on human sexuality.
Dr. Angelita Aguirre of Human Life International has said the sex education program is “devoid of full disclosure and truth telling”, pointing out that the manual fails to inform youth that condoms have will not protect them 100 percent of the time against sexually transmitted disease.
“[Acting Secretary] Fe Hidalgo ordered a stop to the distribution of the modules after getting the feedback. Before we circulate them, we needed to get feedback. So we’ve been receiving a lot of comments,” said Vilma Labrador the assistant secretary. The government has now ceased the program until it meets with representatives of the Catholic Bishops conference later this week.
The Math of Teenage Sex
By Christopher Wanjek, LiveScience’s Bad Medicine Columnist
America’s left and right are once again at odds, this time over a plan at the King Middle School in Portland, Maine, to make birth control pills available without parental approval to girls as young as 11. The school committee voted 7 to 2 in favor of the plan last Wednesday.
You know kids are having sex early these days when contraception pills could be marketed as Flintstone Chewables.
One side asks: Is it moral to sanction early sexual activity? The reality, the other side counters, is that teenagers are sexually active and the burden of unwanted pregnancies is too high.
Expect no resolution anytime soon. Perhaps middle ground could be reached, however, if we focus on the wonderful opportunity this issue provides us to improve our teenagers’ dismal math skills.
If you do the math—worthy of an SAT prep course, with fractions and large numbers—you’ll find that early sex plus the Pill equals sexually transmitted disease and maybe even pregnancy.
In a perfect world
Oral contraception is a superb method of birth control, more than 99 percent effective if used properly. The chances of a teenage girl using the Pill properly are likely closer to zero, however, making this a rather dicey method to prevent pregnancy. There’s no solid data supporting the practicality of getting very young teens on the Pill.
That’s math lesson number one for the middle school kids. The concept of 99-percent effectiveness—or 99.7 percent for the combination estrogen and progestin pill, to be precise—is based on perfect use, an unrealistic laboratory dream. For the average woman, who forgets to take the Pill some days, the rate drops to around 90 to 95 percent. For the average teenage girl, who forgets to turn off the hairdryer, the rate is lower yet.
And of course, the Pill does nothing to prevent STDs.
Sex by numbers
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 15- to 24-year-olds make up about half of all new STD cases each year, despite representing only a quarter of the sexually active population. That’s 9.1 million young folks among the 18.9 million contracting an STD each year.
Here comes math lesson number two. According to the last census, the 15- to 24-year-old bracket was about 14 percent of the U.S. population, which means there are about 42 million adolescents and young adults among 300 million Americans. Nine million cases divided by 42 million people translates to 21 percent, or more than one in five under age 24 with an STD.
More math: Nearly 75 percent of new chlamydia cases and 60 percent of new gonorrhea cases are in this age bracket, according to the CDC. Compared to women in all other age categories, 15- to 19-year-old females have the highest rate of gonorrhea. More than 10 percent of all 15- to 24-year olds have genital herpes. There are TV commercials for herpes, after all, because the STD is so widespread, affecting 45 million Americans.
These and other STDs, such as the human papillomavirus, the most common among young adults, can bring serious consequences, such as infertility and cancer.
Getting an early start
The earlier one becomes sexually active, without a condom and perhaps emboldened by some false idea of the protections offered by the Pill, the greater the risk of contracting an STD.
A girl “sophisticated” enough to seek oral contraception at a health clinic likely has a boyfriend, often older, pressuring her to have sex without a condom, or she is already sexually experienced. Either way, the odds are against her remaining disease free.
Alas, American teenagers don’t like math. They like sex. The King Middle School reported 17 pregnancies in four years; the number of miscarriages and abortions are unknown.
Handing out prescriptions for oral contraception is no solution, but coupled with counseling by health professionals who try to dissuade girls from becoming sexually active and who insist on condom use, the plan might have a positive outcome.
Too bad more teenagers can’t be like me in high school, homely and sarcastic. Then they would have little chance of having sex.
Is the Internet Warping Our Brains?
By Robert Roy Britt, Editorial Director
The Internet is no doubt changing modern society. It has profoundly altered how we gather information, consume news, carry out war, and create and foster social bonds. But is it altering our brains? A growing number of scientists think so, and studies are providing data to show it.
What remains to be seen is whether the changes are good or bad, and whether the brain is, as one neuroscientist believes, undergoing unprecedented evolution.
Texting and instant messaging, social networking sites and the Internet in general can certainly be said to distract people from other tasks. But what researchers are worrying more about are the plastic brains of teens and young adults who are now growing up with all this, the “digital natives” as they’re being called.
“My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment,” said Baroness Greenfield, an Oxford University neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution, in The Daily Mail today. “I often wonder whether real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitised and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf.”
Odd analogy, but one worth pondering.
Inevitable brain change
Every generation adapts to change, and the brain gets used for different purposes. For ancient man there was the spear, the mammoth, and the rock to hide behind. Agriculture changed the world, as did writing. Then came gunpowder, the Industrial Revolution, radio, and TV dinners. Man would never be the same. Adapt or die, hiding behind a rock with no friends, no family.
The pace picked up. Cell phones changed everything. Smart phones made them seem quaint. Our brains adapted. I used to have dozens of phone numbers committed to memory. Now that they’re all in my Blackberry (and before that the Palm, going back a decade now) I can remember only those I’d memorized when I was a child. I don’t even know my wife’s cell phone or work number. I’m not sure what all that brain capacity is being used for now, other struggling to focus on writing columns like this while checking email several times and surfing from valid research sites to unrelated pages detailing the latest condition of Jane Goody, who I’ve never heard of until recently, to reaching for my hip when my stomach gurgles but I think my phone is vibrating (a modern condition called phantom vibration syndrome).
But I digress. And I’m touching on the “Google is making us stupid” notion, written about last summer in the Atlantic by Nicholas Carr, who notes how he used to “spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text.”
Carr blames the lack of concentration on a decade of being online.
But forget us old folks. What about the kids, whose online use we, er, monitor?
The Daily Mail article today points out that students tend no longer to plan essays before starting to write: Thanks to computers and MS Word, they can edit as they go along. I grew up learning to do an outline on paper before writing any essay or story, a habit that was reinforced in journalism school. I rarely do so anymore (though when the writing doesn’t go well, it’s still a great tactic). Good or bad? I’m not sure. Change, yes. Nowadays I think with my fingers, and my brain bounces around a lot more when I write, outlining on the fly.
Yet I worry about my children and what skills they’ll develop spending hours a day either on a computer, using a cell phone to talk or text or surf (while driving?!) or watching TV, and whether all that activity will enhance their well being, help them make lifelong friendships, find a mate, get a job. Teens have always hidden out (in the woods, under the grandstands, or in their rooms), but now, thanks to their various electronic social networks, a cell phone and perhaps a laptop tuned to Hulu, they can truly become hermits, harder than ever to coax out. The dinner bell, long ago replaced with a shout down the hallway, has now given way to an evening SMS.
Learning experience
On the assumption that technological progress can’t be stopped, the flip-side to the inevitable digitalization of life is the simple argument that kids need to learn new digital skills to survive and thrive in our fast-changing society.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota last year asked 16- to 18-year-olds what they learn from using social networking sites. The students listed technology skills as the top lesson, followed by creativity, then being open to new or diverse views and communication skills.
“What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today,” said Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher at the university and leader of the study.
One example Greenhow gave: A student might take up video production after seeing a cool video on MySpace. “Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customizing content and thinking about online design and layout,” she explained. “They’re also sharing creative original work like poetry and film and practicing safe and responsible use of information and technology. The Web sites offer tremendous educational potential.”
It’s up to educators [and parents?], Greenhow believes, to figure out how to leverage all this.
Evolution of a new human brain?
Meanwhile, much more research needs to be done to determine if social networking sites, and the Internet in general, are good or bad for children and teens, or neither. Studies going back to the late 1990s have flip-flopped on this as often as new social networking sites pop up.
For now, there are only hints and indications that all this change may indeed lead to young brains that work differently than those of previous generations. But evidence is indeed mounting.
“We are seeing children’s brain development damaged because they don’t engage in the activity they have engaged in for millennia,” says Sue Palmer, author of “Toxic Childhood” (Orion, 2007). “I’m not against technology and computers. But before they start social networking, they need to learn to make real relationships with people.”
Others think a profound evolutionary change is underway.
UCLA neuroscientist Gary Small thinks the dramatic shift in how we gather information and communicate has touched off a rapid evolution of the brain.
“Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically,” Small contends. “As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills.”
(Can you keep up? They may depend in part on how your brain is wired. People who welcome new experiences have stronger connections between their brain centers associated with memory and reward than people who tend to avoid anything new, scientists recently reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience.)
Small, author of “iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind” (Collins Living, 2008), puts people into two categories: digital natives (your kids) and digital immigrants (the rest of us who cope with varying degrees of success with all this). The former are better at snap decisions and juggling lots of sensory input; the latter are great at reading facial expressions.
“The typical immigrant’s brain was trained in completely different ways of socializing and learning, taking things step-by-step and addressing one task at a time,” Small says.
Interestingly, while Internet use causes changes in brain activity and wiring among people of any age, as a brain-scan study showed, the changes are most pronounced among digital natives. As Small puts it, just searching the Internet “appears to engage a greater extent of neural circuitry that is not activated during reading — but only in those with prior Internet experience.”
For the sake of balance, perhaps we should require all children to learn how to skin and butcher an animal.
The Ethical and Legal Implications of Octuplets
By Christopher Wanjek, LiveScience’s Bad Medicine Columnist
We all know about the old woman who lived in a shoe, the one with all those kids and who didn’t know what to do. Well, one thing she didn’t do was have eight more kids. And this wasn’t because nothing rhymes with octuplets.
Having eight children at once — or seven, six, five or four, for that matter — is not healthy for the children. Such human litters rarely occur naturally because, the sad truth is, the children rarely survive to adulthood to mate and to pass along a genetic predisposition to multiple births.
It’s a simple medical fact that the more babies in the brood, the lower their average birth weight. And the lower their birth weight, the more they are susceptible to a lifetime of health and social challenges.
The question is why would a medical doctor deliberately implant six embryos in a woman when this would guarantee a known medical condition called “very low birth weight” (VLBW) or quite possibly “extreme low birth weight” (ELBW). Among Nadya Suleman’s eight new children, six were VLBW (below 3.3 pounds) and two were ELBW (below 2.2 pounds).
Implanting disease
The California Medical Board and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine are curious, too. Earlier this month they announced separately that they were investigating the Suleman case, stopping short of naming Michael Kamrava, the fertility doctor thought to have aided Suleman.
While much has been said about the social ramifications of the Suleman octuplets — such as issues about being a single mother, or the impact on the welfare system — these medical organizations need to investigate the case as they would any malpractice suit: Did the doctor deliberately put eight children at risk for serious medical conditions?
The science is rather conclusive that VLBW and particularly ELBW pose serious health risks. Many of these babies don’t survive their first year, succumbing to hypothermia, respiratory problems, electrolyte imbalances, anemia, hemorrhaging, poor absorption of nutrients or infections.
Many babies survive and indeed thrive, but the odds are stacked against them.
Tough road
A study published in JAMA in 2005 followed over 200 ELBW babies until age 8 and found 14 percent to have cerebral palsy; 21 percent to have asthma; 10 percent to have vision worse than 20/200; nearly 40 percent to have an IQ lower than 85, which approaches a mental deficiency; and nearly 50 percent with poor motor skills.
Similarly, a study in Pediatrics in 2000 found that more than 50 percent of VLBW babies and up to 70 percent ELBW babies need special assistance at school.
Bad news often follows these kids through life.
Many studies of VLBW reveal higher rates of attention deficit disorders, brain abnormalities, hearing loss and chronic diseases. A 2007 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that VLBW adults are at greater risk of developing diabetes and high blood pressure due to worsening glucose intolerance from birth.
A 2004 study in Pediatrics showed VLBW adults had on average a 17 percent reduction in the size of their posterior corpus callosum, that part of the brain that connects the left and right hemispheres. A 2008 Swedish study revealed half of VLBW adults had below-average IQs, with nearly 12 percent classified with extremely low intelligence.
Improving the odds
ELBW and VLBW are on the rise as a result in part of infertility treatments and multiple births. Yet other, poorly understood factors are at play, such as a mother’s race, age and general health.
The health costs are staggering. A 2007 study in Pediatrics estimates that nearly $6 billion is spent annually on low-birth-weight deliveries, with an average ELBW birth costing $65,600.
The good news is that more and more ELBW and VLBW individuals are leading healthier lives with few if any cognitive delays as the result of medication and other interventions. Suleman children, if they are lucky, will grow up healthy. They are in fact off to a good start, born heavier than expected.
If these innocent kids survive and thrive, then the doctor, too, is lucky. His professional peers, however, might not view him any less guilty of placing eight children at risk for a hard life.
