Health advocates and students were arrested outside the White House today during a protest right before World Aids Day, according to The Washington Post.

 Demonstrators said the Bush administration’s response to the spread of AIDS has been ineffective. They called for increased funding and an end to abstinence-only sex education requirements for U.S.-funded HIV and AIDS programs internationally. They said the disease also has been largely ignored at home in the nation’s capital, which has the country’s worst rate of infection.

AVERT, an international AIDS charity, has a Web page devoted to the relationship between HIV infection rates and sex education.

According to a Los Angeles Times article, there is an increasing national push among public health officials and educators for more HIV prevention efforts aimed at aging baby boomers and seniors.

In Arizona, volunteers regularly have passed out free condoms at community centers, and state health workers in Florida host safe-sex programs in retirement communities. In Broward County, Fla., the Senior HIV Intervention Project recruits retired boomers and older residents throughout the region to become “safe-sexperts” who can convince their neighbors to get tested for STDs.

The article suggests seniors are overlooked in HIV prevention and safe sex education initiatives because the over-50 population is a relatively small segment of the population at-risk for sexually transmitted diseases.

Approximately four times as many HIV diagnoses occurred in people ages 25 to 44 as in those 50 and older, according to a 2005 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But this makes seniors more vulnerable because they are overlooked and may have a false sense of security, or a sense of immunity to STDs as they grow older.

Older patients may feel uncomfortable discussing STD risks. But in addition, doctors are also potentially uncomfortable talking about these issues with patients old enough to be their parents or grandparents, according to a recent study backed by the National Institutes of Health.
Another factor to consider is that people now are living longer than previous generations have, and enjoying extended sex lives because of hormone therapy and erectile dysfunction drugs, according to the article.

What do you think? Do you think more funding should be allocated for HIV education and prevention efforts aimed at seniors? According to the article, the majority of funding for preventive education over the last two decades has been aimed at traditional high-risk populations, including teens, gays and urban residents.

A Maine woman has lodged a formal complaint about a sex education book, saying it violates the city’s obscenity ordinance.

JoAn Karkos refused to return the book, “It’s Perfectly Normal” by Robie H. Harris, and urged police to issue a citation against Lewiston Public Library. The library eventually had police issue a summons for the book’s return.

According to other news articles, Karkos learned about the book from American Life League’s protest of the book, including a full-page advertisement in the Washington Times last year that likened the book to porn.

The American Life League released a video news release about the book this week. The American Life League is an opponent of Planned Parenthood and says it plans to release other news releases about the pro-choice organization’s activities. Planned Parenthood published an interview with the book’s author last year in which he responded to critics’ objections to his book.

How explicit do you think children’s sex education books can be without being too much for kids? Have you read or seen this book? You can read excerpts of the book.

A task force has recommended that Denver high schools offer birth control, according to the Los Angeles Times. The school board has not formally considered the recommendation, but the proposal has stirred the debate about whether schools should provide contraception and, if so, whether parental consent should be required.

Denver’s teen birth rate is “more than double the statewide rate of 24.3 births per 1,000 girls age 15 to 17, and Denver school officials are considering a proposal to dispense contraceptives in its six high-school-based health clinics, which serve the district’s most impoverished students,” according to the article.

Opponents say the easy availability would encourage youngsters to have sex.

Proponents counter that sexually active teens should have as much access to birth control as possible.

Recently, a Maine school decided to offer birth control to middle schoolers, leading to controversy and widespread publicity. But most of the country’s school-based health clinics do not dispense contraceptives, according to a spokeswoman for the National Assembly on School-Based Health Care quoted in the L.A. Times article.

In light of last week’s Democratic presidential debate in which Dennis Kucinich explicitly stated support for sex education and birth control, I wanted to post an overview of the candidates’ policies. The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States posted a helpful policy update in August, based on candidates’ past speeches and public statements.

Here’s a summary of the a few of the candidates’ policies, according to SIECUS:

Democrats:

• Barack Obama supports sex education for kindergartners if it is age-appropriate, such as learning the difference between appropriate and inappropriate touching to educate young children on what to do if facing an abusive situation.
• Hillary Clinton was a co-sponsor of the Putting Prevention First Act, which would also establish a federal funding stream for comprehensive sex education.
• Dennis Kucinich is the only Democratic presidential candidate who has co-sponsored the Responsible Education About Life (REAL) Act—legislation which would establish federal funding for comprehensive programs that teach about abstinence, condoms, and contraception.

Republicans:

• Rudy Giuliani’s position on sex education is somewhat unclear. As mayor of New York City, Giuliani supported condom availability in public schools, but hasn’t spoken publicly on his views since seeking the presidential nomination.
  
• Mitt Romney checked “yes” to the question, “Do you support the teaching of responsible, age-appropriate, factually accurate health and sexuality education, including information about both abstinence and contraception, in public schools?” in a 2002 questionnaire from Planned Parenthood. But as governor of Massachusetts, he was a supporter of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.
• John McCain supports abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.

Women’s eNews offers additional information about even more candidates’ views.  You can watch last Thursday’s Democratic debate or read the transcript. The next presidential debate (Republicans) is scheduled for Nov. 28.

A researcher at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville is questioning results of a Ohio State University study in February that claimed teens who lose their virginity earlier than their peers are more likely to become juvenile delinquents.  According to the Washington Post article, “so obvious and well established was the contribution of early sex to later delinquency that the idea was already part of the required curriculum for federal ‘abstinence only’ programs.”

There was just one problem: It is probably not true. Other things being equal, a more probing study has found, youngsters who have consensual sex in their early-teen or even preteen years are, if anything, less likely to engage in delinquent behavior later on.

The new study “really calls into question the usefulness of abstinence education for preventing behavior problems,” Harden [a leader of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville study] said, “and questions the bigger underlying assumption that all adolescent sex is always bad.”

A New York Times blog post draws a comparison between the seemingly unrelated driving exam in South Africa and abstinence-only sex education in the U.S.

Health educators risk students’ well-being by being too politically correct, according to a column in WorldNetDaily.com.  The author cites Miriam Grossman, author of the book “Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student.”

According to the article,  Dr. Grossman has garnered media attention because of her claim that health educators risk students’ health by promoting a “particular ideology – usually a combination of feminism, androgyny and ‘anything goes’ liberalism.”

The commentary goes further, saying that young women are particularly hurt by this ideology.

One fact absent from most sex education programs is that young girls are more susceptible to STDs than mature women. They don’t include information about the cervical transformation zone (or T-Zone), a ring of cells that is vulnerable to infection. The transformation zone is dramatically larger in a teenage girl, but shrinks as she gets older.

The commentary says the rationale for this ideology is that “sex educators like the idea of telling teens to have sex as soon as they feel ready not because it’s good for them, but because they see it as the values-neutral position.”

For more about Grossman, you can also read a recent San Francisco Chronicle article in which she discusses her book and what she sees as dangers in the casual “hook-up” environment on college campuses.

What do you think?  Do you think sex education programs are too politically correct to the point of being permissive, sending the message that it’s okay to have sex early?

According to the Christian Post and CitizenLink.com, a study published in the Jan./Feb. 2008 issue of the “American Journal of Health Behavior” will show that programs by the Virginia health department’s Abstinence Education Initiative resulted in a “significant reduction in teen sexual initiation.”

The Institute for Research and Evaluation evaluated the impact of the programs by examining the behavior of seventh-graders from five different Virginia schools. The study concluded that those students receiving abstinence education were about one-half (45.7 percent) as likely to initiate sexual activity as students who did not receive abstinence education.

News of the study broke soon after this week’s announcement that Virginia’s governor had decided to halt funding for abstinence-only education programs.  It also comes on the heels of a nationwide study that stated abstinence-only education is unproven for stopping teen sex.

The New York Times recently reported on the “vajayjay,” or the nickname for a vagina, that sprang into the popular lexicon after being featured on “Grey’s Anatomy” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” Shonda Rhimes, the creator of “Grey’s Anatomy,” decided to use the nickname after facing resistance from the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates media decency standards.

“I had written an episode during the second season of ‘Grey’s’ in which we used the word vagina a great many times (perhaps 11),” Ms. Rhimes wrote in an e-mail message. “Now, we’d once used the word penis 17 times in a single episode and no one blinked. But with vagina, the good folks at broadcast standards and practices blinked over and over and over. I think no one is comfortable experiencing the female anatomy out loud — which is a shame considering our anatomy is half the population.”

Rhimes was not alone in her reluctance to use a nickname for female anatomy. According to the article, Eve Ensler argued long-ago in “The Vagina Monologues” that “what we don’t say becomes a secret, and secrets often create shame and fear and myths.” Vagina, her widely performed series of monologues declared, is too often an “invisible word,” one “that stirs up anxiety, awkwardness, contempt and disgust.”

In a recent post that I wrote, one of sex therapist Dr. David McKenzie’s tips for parents talking to kids about sex was to use correct terminology. He said parents with good intentions sometimes use nicknames, but that it actually makes it more difficult for kids to comfortably ask questions about their bodies as they mature.

Meanwhile, Dr. Carol A. Livoti, a Manhattan obstetrician and gynecologist, said in the New York Times article that euphemisms and slang for women’s body parts can render women incapable of explaining their symptoms to health professionals. But in the article, Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the chairman of the usage panel for the American Heritage Dictionary, said there was a need for a pet name, “a name that women can use in a familiar way among themselves.”

How do you think nicknames affect sex education and discussions about maturing bodies? Also, what do you think of the suggestion that the FCC has a double standard in its decency standards, coming down more heavily on the use of “vagina” than “penis”?

You can read blogosphere discussions, including postings on The Huffington Post and Boing Boing.

Watch a comedic “Talk Soup” video that includes the clips from “Oprah” and “Grey’s Anatomy” in which “vajayjay” was used: