4paretns.gov is a government website run by the Department of Health and Human Services that is meant to provide parents with “information” to help “ teens make healthy choices.”
But this “information” is not grounded in science. A recent federal report concluded that abstinence-only programs have had “no impact on rates of sexual abstinence.” Yet the latest public service announcement by 4parents.gov “encourages parents to talk with their kids about waiting to have sex.”
In the ad, various children say that they want their parents to talk to them about sex and tell them to “wait.” Near the end, the narrator says, “Tell your kids you want them to wait ’til they’re married to have sex.”
In July, ThinkProgress noted that 4parents.gov revised its website to include ideological, unscientific claims.
Additionally, when the site launched in 2005, it told parents “to convince their teens to stop having sex by telling their children that they are ‘worth it.’” But no resources were provided for “parents whose teen remains sexually active, implying that these youth are not ‘worth it.’”
[I like the commercial. I think the message of having parents talk to their children about sex is a good thing. I think the long a teenage waits to have sex is better. But why is the Bush administration wasting millions of dollars on another abstinence campaign? Abstinence campaigns don’t work, we know that. Research repeated shows they don’t work. Didn’t the Bush administration learn from the billions wasted in the U.S. funded abstinence-only AIDS campaigns that didn’t work in Africa?]
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