No, It’s Not ‘Safe’
The Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society performs a valuable service by summarizing important findings from scholarly journals that the mainstream media are sure to ignore. Here’s a recent Howard Center summary:
“For decades, progressive thinkers have scoffed at traditional prohibitions against fornication, regarding adolescent sexual experimentation as completely normal and entirely healthy – so long as public health officials furnish teens with a reliable supply of contraceptives and sex educators provide instructions in their use. But a new study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry by a team of researchers from Yale, Georgia State, and the Free University in the Netherlands strongly links adolescent sexual activity with serious psychological and social problems that no contraceptive will ever resolve.
“Drawing on data collected in 1998 from 1,413 female students under the age of sixteen enrolled in public schools in New Haven, Connecticut, the authors of the new study investigate the relationship between sexual activity and several ‘global measures of psychosocial adaptation’ – namely, depressive symptoms, future expectations, academic motivation, and academic achievement. The results could hardly be clearer: Compared to ‘sexually naïve peers’ (words like ‘chaste’ and ‘abstinent’ have disappeared from social scientists’ lexicon), ‘sexually active adolescent girls fared significantly more poorly on all four measures of adaptation.’ That is, compared to abstinent peers, young female students who are sexually active ‘endorsed significantly more symptoms of depression, had a more pessimistic outlook about their futures, felt less academically motivated, and did less well in school.’
“Only in the magical thinking of progressive theorists will passing out more contraceptives make everything better.”
“For decades, progressive thinkers have scoffed at traditional prohibitions against fornication, regarding adolescent sexual experimentation as completely normal and entirely healthy – so long as public health officials furnish teens with a reliable supply of contraceptives and sex educators provide instructions in their use. But a new study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry by a team of researchers from Yale, Georgia State, and the Free University in the Netherlands strongly links adolescent sexual activity with serious psychological and social problems that no contraceptive will ever resolve.
“Drawing on data collected in 1998 from 1,413 female students under the age of sixteen enrolled in public schools in New Haven, Connecticut, the authors of the new study investigate the relationship between sexual activity and several ‘global measures of psychosocial adaptation’ – namely, depressive symptoms, future expectations, academic motivation, and academic achievement. The results could hardly be clearer: Compared to ‘sexually naïve peers’ (words like ‘chaste’ and ‘abstinent’ have disappeared from social scientists’ lexicon), ‘sexually active adolescent girls fared significantly more poorly on all four measures of adaptation.’ That is, compared to abstinent peers, young female students who are sexually active ‘endorsed significantly more symptoms of depression, had a more pessimistic outlook about their futures, felt less academically motivated, and did less well in school.’
“Only in the magical thinking of progressive theorists will passing out more contraceptives make everything better.”
