Your tax dollars at work?

Spotted recently: several TV ads from the Washington State Department of Health hyping its sex ed program and Web site, No Sex, No Problems.

You can view the multiple spots that have been polluting my airwaves lately. (My personal favorite: This spot featuring a bunch of kids, few of whom appear to have reached puberty or to have any comprehension of what exactly "sex" is, giving all their reasons why they aren't going to have sex yet. Sadly, none gives the obvious answer, that my body simply hasn't matured to the point where I possess the hormones to make sex feasible, or desirable.)

Of course, this one of the "abstinence-only" programs the Bush administration and religious right are heralding as the solution to all ills associated with sex: teenage pregnancy, STDs, physical pleasure, procreation by liberals and other designated "enemies," etc.

As the Web site notes: "Funding for this program does not endorse information beyond the scope of the federal Abstinence Education definition."

The upshot of this is, of course, that there's no mention of condoms, contraceptives and other precautions one should take in the event one opts to have sex and wants to minimize the consequences.

Really it's a terrible mixed message. On the one hand, the program gives teens credit for being able to make choices on their own and thus is encouraging them to make responsible choices. On the other hand, let's face it, some teens are going to choose to have sex anyway. Try as we might to prevent that from occurring, it's going to happen. (No amount of federal funding for these abstinence programs is going to reverse eternal patterns of human behavior: teens have been having sex since there first were teens.) Adopting a one-size-fits-all approach is only going to exacerbate the situation.

I know I'm not the first to point this out, but I think we, as a society, really need to reevaluate some of our views. Will distributing condoms, birth-control pills and information about responsible sex give teens the impression that it's OK to have sex? Perhaps. But I'm willing to bet that most of those teens would've reached that conclusion on their own. And those are precisely the teens who fall through the cracks of abstinence-only education and thus don't get the information and protection they need.

An example from Soviet history is instructive: In the Soviet Union, more than 80 percent of all women underwent an abortion by the end of their childbearing years, with an average of two to four abortions each. Even during the heyday of glasnost, perestroika and Gorbachev, this figure didn't change. By 1989, with less than 6 percent of the global population, the Soviet Union accounted for perhaps 20 percent of all abortions worldwide. (The actual number may have been even higher, but a number of abortions were performed outside state channels for reasons of anesthesia, cleanliness, confidentiality, etc.)

Why did Soviet women have abortions in such alarming numbers? It wasn't just promiscuous young women and teenage girls who had failed to take appropriate precautions. Because for the most part, those precautions weren't available. The Soviet Union had a shortage of effective contraception, causing women to turn to abortion as birth control of last resort.

But there's more to it than that. Another reason why this parallel is revealing is the social attitude toward contraception most Soviet citizens had. As in, they didn't know about other birth control options. Consequently, an estimated 25 to 75 percent of all Soviet couples didn't regular use any form of contraception. And most disturbing, ob-gyn's -- the people who should be expected to inform women about birth control options -- often didn't because they had lucrative sidelines performing private abortions. (Source: Stephen Kotkin, Steeltown, USSR, 131-132.)

The moral of this story? You can't have it both ways. Either you promote abstinence alone and deal with the mounting social costs of rising rates of teenage pregnancy, abortion, STDs, etc., or you face reality and accept that people are going to have sex, much as you'd prefer they didn't, so you at least educate and equip them appropriately. You'd think the people who want to resort to invasive and authoritarian measures to prevent abortions would do more to prevent the likelihood of women seeking abortions. But if I've learned anything from living in this country the past several years, it's that you can't expect that sort of logical consistency from most people.