A Connecticut TV station reports that Planned Parenthood teen educators duly preach the organization's "just do it" message:
"I don't think oral sex is real sex," said Georgia Wetmore of New Haven, a peer educator who works with Planned Parenthood of New Haven. "I think most teens believe that."Those attitudes are directly reflective of Planned Parenthood's attempts to hypersexualize young teens via such resources as its Teenwire Web site, which lists oral sex (under the name "erotic massage") as an option among "Birth Control Choices for Teens." (For more on Teenwire, see "The Young and the Hot-Wired," the exposée I wrote for Touchstone.)
"As long as you don't let yourself out more, to get yourself a name as a slut or a dog or something, you're cool," said Domenia Dickey of New Haven, another peer educator.
Planned Parenthood's approach has been shown to do just what one might guess from those peer educators' advice: encourage risky sexual behavior. I wrote earlier this year in National Review Online about how teen STD rates skyrocketed in California after it rejected federal funding for abstinence programs in favor of Planned Parenthood's recommendations for "comprehensive sexual education":
To hear Planned Parenthood’s spokespeople tell it, the increased incidence of STDs can be blamed on one thing: government-funded abstinence-education programs that fail to promote condom use.
There’s just one problem with that argument: According to the state’s Department of Education website, a 2003 statewide survey found that 96 percent of California school districts provided comprehensive sexual health education (read: condom instruction) and all its schools have been required to teach HIV/AIDS prevention education (read: more condom instruction) since 1992. Planned Parenthood’s educators have long been welcome in school districts across California, and in 1996 the state became the first to reject federal funding for abstinence programs.
In other words, in the state that best models Planned Parenthood’s brand of "comprehensive sexual education," the approach has failed to do one of the main things it is supposed to do: prevent disease.
