By Rachel Hart, Reproductive Freedom Project at 5:32pm
Imagine this: The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) decides to put together a Web site to help parents talk to their children about a number of issues, including sex. HHS needs help finding content to populate the site with reliable information about contraceptives and sexually transmitted diseases. Who should they reach out to for help?
Maybe HHS should turn to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the National Institute of Health (NIH)? Logical choices. Or maybe HHS would contact major medical societies dedicated to teen health, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics or the Society for Adolescent Medicine?
By Rachel Hart, Reproductive Freedom Project at 10:55am
Great article on sex-ed in the April issue of Diablo. Renee Walker, an amazing activist out of CA was interviewed for the piece.
Buoyed by this victory and incensed to find that more abstinence-only programs were operating in area schools, Walker in 2003 founded Bay Area Communities for Health Education (BACHE), which is dedicated to supporting comprehensive sex education, encompassing both abstinence and contraceptives. She spends at least two hours a day on BACHE-related activities, much of it poring over literature used in abstinence-only sex education classes looking for inaccurate or misleading material.
Marshall Bright is an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania who was instrumental in raising awareness of the problems with abstinence-only education in
By Rachel Hart, Reproductive Freedom Project at 5:04pm
Over the course of this blog I've discussed father/daughter Purity Balls, and even recently the introduction of a mother/son Integrity Ball. Purity Balls, an off-shoot of the abstinence-only-until-marriage movement, bring fat
By Rachel Hart, Reproductive Freedom Project at 8:16am
Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece called Winning the Battle On Teen Pregnancy. The article compares two adjacent counties in South Carolina (Allendale and Bamberg) that have similar demographi
By Rachel Hart, Reproductive Freedom Project at 12:30pm
The Boston Globe ran a story on the HPV vaccine on Monday. If you've been following the HPV debate you'll already know that critics think the vaccine (which can protect against some strains of HPV and in turn protect against contracting cervical cancer) will make teens more promiscuous. But as one of the doctor's interviewed for the article says, "If we have a safe and effective way to prevent a particularly prevalent form of cancer, then why wouldn't we do that?"
By Rachel Hart, Reproductive Freedom Project at 2:52pm
Today marks the 35th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark abortion rights decision Roe v. Wade. In honor of the anniversary, the ACLU put together a video featuring interviews with ACLU staff from across the organization concerning the role of reproductive freedom in ensuring the full-range of civil liberties. If you
By Rachel Hart, Reproductive Freedom Project at 1:59pm
With the New Year upon us, it seems only right to examine the state of sex education in the U.S. Launched in June 2005, this blog has witnessed a great deal of change. Back then, only a handful of states had rejected federal funds for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs -- in 2008 Read More»
