The FY10 Labor-HHS Appropriations bill heads to the House floor today. The Appropriations Committee approved this annual spending bill for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education last week. While the appropriation includes funds for programs to “help at-risk women and teens bear healthy children,” it eliminates funding for abstinence education and conspicuously disavows the very means to ensure that teens will not become pregnant in the first place. Removal of abstinence-only education funding was not entirely unexpected after Congress let the only other source of abstinence …
Tomorrow, Rick Warren, author of the 2002 best-seller “The Purpose Driven Life,” will host John McCain and Barack Obama at his 22,000-member Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., where he will question them on matters of concern to evangelical Christians, including poverty, the environment, human rights and AIDS. The standard media line that evangelicals are “divided” along political fault lines misses the point, as Heritage’s Ryan Messmore notes on National Review Online today. A better focus should be not what government can and should do to alleviate social problems but …
Barely half — a mere 52 percent – of students in America’s 50 most populous metropolitan areas graduated in the 2003-04 school year, according to the Department of Education. Colin L. Powell, former U.S. Secretary of State and founding chairman of the America’s Promise Alliance, called the situation “not just a crisis; this is a catastrophe.” Here’s one factor that has proven helpful to keeping youths in school longer: abstinence education. Studies show abstinent teens report, on average, better psychological well-being and higher academic achievement than those who are sexually active. As the data below …
It’s rather ironic that “safe-sex” advocates blame abstinence education for the teen birth rate increase or for the high prevalence of STDs among adolescent girls when decades and billions of taxpayers’ dollars have been spent on promoting condoms to teens and we see results like the CDC report shows. When one in four adolescent girls is infected with at least one sexually transmitted disease, and one in two report ever engaging in sexual activity, the problem is obviously more than just about contraception and the consequences go beyond STDs and …
