More than 40 percent of adolescent girls, ages 15 to 19, are sexually active, according to the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. And some 750,000 teen girls get pregnant every year.
So what did ACOG recommend this week to prevent teen pregnancies? Offer under-age girls “long-acting reversible contraception” – intrauterine devices (IUDs) and contraceptive implants.
“I absolutely think that teens should be using these methods as first line,” Dr. Lisa Perriera, an ACOG member, an OB/GYN at CaseMedicalCenter in Cleveland, told ABC News.
“The important thing for teens to know,” she said, “is that these devices are an on/off switch for getting pregnant. They’re truly great.”
What Perriera is telling teen girls, in effect, is go ahead and have sex. Just make sure you have an IUD.
Well, this Christ follower thinks there is a far more important thing for teens to know: No matter what doctors and the devil tell them, they are not hard-wired by their Creator to have pre-marital sex.
They’re not a salmon that must swim upstream. They’re not swallows that must return to Capistrano.
While the popular culture tells them that all their teen-age peers are having sex, it’s a Big Lie. Indeed, ACOG itself acknowledges that nearly 60 percent of teen girls are not sexually active.
Instead of promoting teen use of long-acting reversible contraception as the best way to reduce teen pregnancy, what have been “truly great,” to use Perriera’s words, is ACOG encouraged teen abstinence.
Of course, the medical community, along with the education establishment, think sex education and contraceptives are the better way to prevent 750,000 teen girls from getting pregnant each year.
But they are wrong. And a 2010 study, published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, bears that out.
The study followed six and seventh graders that were divided in two groups, one of which encouraged abstinence, the other contraception and “safe sex.” After two years, researchers found that half of those taught safe sex were sexually active, while only a third taught abstinence only were engaged in sex.
And that third almost certainly would have been even smaller if their abstinence only education was not strictly secular, but also leavened with moral instruction.
For the Bible advises that we train up a child in the way he (or she) should go. And the way for teens to go is to present their young bodies a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.