Sex Education: Basic health care

Here's one that will make parents want to lock up their teenagers: A new federal study shows that at least 25 percent of American teenage girls have a sexually transmitted disease. We'd like to feign shock, but given that the rate of teen pregnancies also shot up between 2005 and 2006, we sort of saw this coming.

Not surprising, some experts say the unsettling numbers are the result of abstinence-only sex education. Not to be swayed by facts, the Bush administration continues increased funding for abstinence-only sex ed while freezing the funds for programs that truly work, such as Planned Parenthood clinics. This means teens have fewer places to go for discreet, free STD screenings and practical, medically based sex-ed information.

It seems that simply telling teens to "Just Say No" to sex until marriage doesn't work well (something we've known for some time, thanks to a 2007 study requested by Congress), especially given that teens who avoid intercourse still leave themselves open to STD transmission via other sorts of sexual conduct. Indeed, only about 50 percent of the girls surveyed admitted to having sexual intercourse in the most traditional term (which excludes other forms of sexual contact). Eighty percent of the girls who reported having sex had an STD.

Just how scary do the statistics have to get before our government stops approaching sex ed as a religious issue and starts dealing with it as a matter of basic health care?