So Condoms Help Prevent Babies? I Thought They Were A Tool Of The Devil

I nearly had a heart-attack when I scrolled all the way down to the bottom of the MSNBC home page to the health section to see this headline, Comprehensive Sex Education May Cut Teen Birth Rate.

Holy cow, really? This is just so revolutionary; it is going to take me decades to wrap my mind around this! Or not. This fact was obvious to me in middle school, when I was lucky enough to attend a school that showed be about birth control instead of just telling me not to have sex. You wanna know how many babies I had in my teen years? None. Later, the state of Florida banned Planned Parenthood from teaching in schools and thanks to federal funding only going to abstinence only programs, well, I’m not even sure what fate holds for Florida’s youths now.

So now, MSNBC is doing some ground-breaking reporting. Telling young girls and boys how to prevent babies may actually…prevent babies.

“Using data from a 2002 national survey, researchers found that among more than 1,700 unmarried, heterosexual teens between 15 and 19 years old, those who'd received comprehensive sex ed in school were 60 percent less likely to have been pregnant or gotten someone pregnant than teens who'd had no formal sex education.

Meanwhile, there was no clear benefit from abstinence-only education in preventing pregnancy or delaying sexual intercourse, the researchers report in the Journal of Adolescent Health.”

Realistically, this isn’t MSNBC’s fault. Some people actually don’t know this stuff to be true, so in that sense, it really is a relevant news story, but I think that is the most depressing part.

This is a subject on which I could go on many tangents, but for now I won’t.