Editor,
I must take issue with Andres Saenz's letter published in the Daily Lobo on Tuesday.
I believe it is Saenz who should indeed have his facts checked. First of all, not all sex leads to having children. Many more teenagers would not have children to put up for adoption if they didn't have sex - this much is true.
However, Saenz's language insinuates that teaching abstinence only is the only way to reduce the number of children born to teenage mothers. This is grossly false and very misleading.
Until recently, a Center for Disease Control initiative called Programs That Work identified sex education programs that have been found to be effective in scientific studies. In 2002, all the five Programs That Work provided comprehensive sex education to teenagers, and none was abstinence only.
Furthermore, in November 2000, under the Clinton administration, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services developed meaningful, scientifically sound outcome measures to assess whether these programs achieved their intended purposes, including the proportion of program participants who have engaged in sexual intercourse and the birth rate of female program participants.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
However, under the Bush administration, these measures have been scrapped and replaced with a set of standards that does not include any real outcomes. Rather than tracking pregnancy or sexual activity, these measures assess attendance and the attitudes of teens at the end of the education program and, according to the U.S. Department of Health, include "proportion of participants who indicate understanding of the social, psychological and health gains to be realized by abstaining from premarital sexual activity."
This means that any statistics about the effectiveness of abstinence-only programs reported by the current government are not scientifically sound. If we conducted all sociological research based on what people said they would do rather than what they actually do, then our understanding of human behavior would be very limited. The facts are there for everyone to access. The best way to educate young people about sex is to teach them about it, not hide them from it as Saenz would wish. Since when has forcing ignorance upon the young ever helped a country?
Saenz also states that he has never seen Christians kill in the name of their religion like Muslims. It seems to me, however, that he is forgetting about this event known as the Crusades.
Can a man who calls himself Christian just ignore the history of his own faith? Christians have killed thousands of people in the name of "their God," as Saenz puts it. People kill in the name of religion, whether Christianity or Islam.
How closed-minded can we be when we don't even want to be in the same room as people who don't believe in what we do? What is this country coming to?
Mario Hernandez
UNM student
