Wow! STDs??? You're Kidding!

You can find stuff to talk about all day long, just clicking around the BBC headlines feed built into Firefox. Here's a real shocker to turn your world upside-down: A lot of teenage girls in the U.S. have sexually transmitted diseases.

Let me fisk through a few quotes here:

The study, by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), found an even higher prevalence of STDs among black girls.

This is true, and sad. It has nothing to do with them being black; it would be more instructive, and the results would be the same, if instead of studying race, you studied family income. Poor teenagers have more sex than rich ones, get pregnant more, and have more STDs. Maybe it's because they have no future to look forward to and so are even more inclined than the average teenager to live for right now and forget tomorrow, but honestly, I don't really think so. Virtually all teenagers are sex-crazed. More likely it's because the poorer kids don't give as much thought to protection.

That isn't the problem, though. We've been preaching the virtues of safe sex to teenagers for 30 years now, and the result has been skyrocketing pregnancy and STD rates. Once we accepted that it's OK for teenagers to be having sex with various partners, it all went to pot. The only reliable solution is: Teenagers need to stop having casual sex. Not only is it dangerous, it's also empty and emotionally damaging.

The CDC's Devin Fenton said it was a serious issue because the diseases could lead to infertility and cervical cancer.

Infertility? Somebody hasn't seen the teenage pregnancy rates lately. By 'lately', I mean anytime in the last 30 years.

John Douglas, the CDC's head of STD prevention, says screenings are underused because teenagers often do not think they are at risk.

No!! Teenagers don't grasp the concept of risk???

Trying to convince a teenager to think about mitigating risk is like trying to convince a dog to look both ways before it starts chasing after a fire engine. The sex itself is the problem; screenings are not a solution. I know most of you think the traditional way of holding down STD levels among teenagers--convincing them from a very young age that having sex with multiple partners is simply not tolerable--was horrifyingly restrictive of their self-expression or whatever, but it worked. Our way doesn't.

Analysts say some doctors are also reluctant to discuss screening with teenage patients because of confidentiality concerns, knowing parents would have to be told of the results.

Did you catch it? The subtle message of this concluding paragraph is: We have to stop parents from being involved. That's exactly the opposite of what would solve the STD/pregnancy problem. The extent to which parents were involved in their childrens' lives and aware of what they were doing correlates pretty much perfectly inversely with STD rates, society-wide. Less parental involvement = more STDs, more pregnancy. Why? Because of more sex.

This is from a few paragraphs further up in the article, but I'm going to close with it:

"Screening, vaccination and other prevention strategies for sexually active women are among our highest public health priorities," he said.

Devin Fenton is avowing to have no understanding of what causes STDs. Sexually transmitted diseases are not caused by lack of screenings, vaccinations or awareness of protection. They are caused by sex with multiple partners. I don't for a minute think Devin Fenton is that stupid. He knows full well what the problem really is, and what the solution really is. But if teenagers stopped having sex, Devin Fenton would lose his high-paying job. The more people that are contracting STDs, the more secure Devin Fenton's job is.