This comes on the heels of a leaked White House memo and HHS guidelines showing the administration plans to teach teenagers “fertility awareness methods” – otherwise known as the rhythm method – in lieu of birth control. Teens can barely get their homework in on time but somehow we’re expected to believe that they’re going to prevent pregnancy by tracking their periods. [...]
Nearly a decade ago, I wrote a book about abstinence-only education. The lies told by federally funded “educators” to students across the country ranged from inaccurate to astounding.
I spoke to young people who were taught they could be arrested for having premarital sex, and others who were warned birth control pills would make them infertile. Students in Montana were told condoms could give them cancer. A widely used textbook taught that Aids is be transmitted by skin-to-skin contact. Another said that a girl who has had sex is no longer “fresh.”
These classes didn’t stop at inaccurate health information – they also promoted outdated gender roles, such as telling students that boys are wired for science while girls are “feelings” oriented and claiming that girls don’t like sex as much as boys so they need to be the ones to “put the brakes on” to stop intimacy. (These kinds of lessons were directly mentioned by young rape victims I spoke to while writing my book. They believed if they were assaulted it was because they didn’t do enough to stop it, or that they “tempted” their attacker.)
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