From: CITIZEN - A website of FOCUS ON THE FAMILY
Family Issues in policy and culture
http://www.family.org/cforum/citizenmag/departments/a0031746.cfm

Centers for Disease Control Admits Condoms Don’t Prevent HPV

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) finally admitted in January what many gynecologists have known for years: Condoms don’t prevent the spread of a sexually transmitted virus that kills 4,000 American women every year.

Not only is the human papillomavirus (HPV) one of the most common STDs in the U.S., with more than 20 million carriers to date, but it’s also the primary cause of cervical cancer—and it spreads to an additional 5.5 million Americans annually, the National Cancer Institute reports. Though the body’s immune system often successfully eradicates the virus, it still poses a major risk, particularly for people whose immunity is compromised. According to a study published in the Journal of Pathology, it’s present in 99.7 percent of all cervical cancers.

The CDC conceded in its report, entitled “Prevention of Genital Human Papillomavirus Infection,” that “even consistent and correct use of condoms would not be expected to offer complete protection from HPV infection.”

Indiana Republican Mark Souder, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources, welcomed the news. He’s repeatedly asked the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to enforce a 2000 law that requires condom manufacturers to label their products with accurate information about HPV. To date, the FDA has not done so. Souder thinks the CDC report could change that, according to one of his staff members.

“This report has certainly put some people in an uncomfortable position,” senior staffer Roland Foster said.

“The CDC isn’t really known for taking an anti-condom position. The science has been settled—and the liberal position [that condoms prevent all major STDS] isn’t supported by it.”

?WHO TO CONTACT: Ask Dr. Mark McClellan, commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, to make sure condom manufacturers label their products with accurate information about HPV. Contact him at 5600 Fishers Lane, Rockville, MD 20857; phone 888-463-6332; fax 301-443-3100; e-mail fda.commissioner@fda.hhs.gov

Women At Risk

HPV is one of the most common STD in the U.S. according to the January/February edition 2004 edition of Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, published by the Allan Guttmacher Institute, HPV accounts for over half of all new cases of STDs contracted by 15- to 24-year-old women every year. In 2000, that age group acquired 9.1 million new STDs, including 4.6 million HPV cases; only 15,000 were infected with HIV.

HPV is the primary cause of cervical cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, nearly 13,000 women develop cervical cancer, and 4,000 of them die from it every year. More than 20 million Americans currently have HPV, and 5.5 million others contract it annually.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: Cervical cancer costs $9,200 to $13,360 per patient every year. And HPV treatment comprises 45 percent of the costs of all STDs in the U.S. annually: Of the $6.5 billion spent on STDs every year, $2.9 billion is spent treating HPV, and $3 billion is spent treating HIV.

Study: Abortion Increases Risk of Death for Women

A leading American medical journal has reported that women who have abortions are three times more likely to die in the following year than women who carry their pregnancies to term.

A study appearing in the February edition of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology compared medical and death records of the entire population of women in Finland between 1987 and 2000. The researchers found that 2.95 times as many women died—both from natural and unnatural causes—in the year after their abortions as women who gave birth.

That confirms what researchers at the Elliot Institute—an abortion research group in Springfield, Ill.—found in a study published in the August 2002 issue of the Southern Medical Journal: Women who have abortions tend to be risk-takers, which explains their higher rates of death from accidents, suicide and homicide. But abortion also increases anxiety and depression, which in turn lead to higher rates of cardiovascular disease and stroke.

That link will need further study, Elliot Institute Director David Reardon, Ph. D., told Citizen. But the fact that independent researchers have found it more than once indicates the connection is no coincidence. And that could help states trying to regulate abortion in the future. According to Roe v. Wade, states have a compelling interest to regulate the procedure when it becomes more dangerous for women than childbirth.

“The claims that abortion is safer than childbirth, all the misinformation you hear from Planned Parenthood—[these studies] blow that right out of the water,” Reardon said.

FOCUS ON FOCUS:

Moms and dads want schools to teach abstinence

When President Bush submitted his budget proposal to Congress, he set off a renewed battle for sex-education dollars. Bush announced in his State of the Union address plans to double federal funding for abstinence-until-marriage education immediately, and triple it by 2005.

That would raise it from the current level of $80 million a year to $273 million next year—narrowing the gap that exists between it and the $2.2 billion the federal and state governments spent on condom-based sex education in 2002.

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), which has received a huge chunk of that funding for the last decade to teach kids about condoms, was quick to denounce Bush’s proposal.

“Not one of these [abstinence] programs has proven effective,” PPFA spokesman Michael McGee told FoxNews.com in March. “It’s not what the public wants.”

But two recent studies would appear to prove McGee wrong.

The first—conducted for Focus on the Family and The Heritage Foundation by Zogby International—reveals that the overwhelming majority of parents want their kids to be taught the value of waiting until they’re married to have sex.

The survey of 1,004 parents nationwide with children 17 or under living at home, conducted between Dec. 18 and 21, 2003, carried a margin of error of 3.2 percentage points. It showed that:

• 68 percent want schools to teach kids that remaining abstinent until marriage gives them the best chance of marital stability and happiness.

• 56 percent said contraception either should not be taught at all, or should be taught separately from abstinence, such as in a health or biology class.

• 40 percent think abstinence and contraception education should be combined. But of those, only 2 percent said sex education should focus on teaching kids how to use condoms.

The 2-percent response on the condom question is a “shocking” number, said Linda Klepacki, manager of the abstinence department at Focus on the Family, “because the vast proportion of government programs in the past had as their goal getting more teens to use more condoms. As hard as the comprehensive sex-education lobby has tried to sell its ‘safe sex’ message, it’s clear parents aren’t buying it.

“This poll illustrates that the people most concerned about the health and emotional well-being of America’s children—their moms and dads—recognize that abstinence is the only surefire way to protect their kids.”

The second study, released Feb. 24 by the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications, found that, of the 18 million new cases of sexually transmitted diseases reported in 2000, nearly half were contracted by sexually active children between the ages of 15 and 19.

Moreover, the report concluded, half of all sexually active teens can realistically expect to contract some kind of STD by the time they’re 25. The Alan Guttmacher Institute—PPFA’s research arm—estimates that about half of the nation’s high schoolers are sexually experienced or active.

The solution, family advocates say, is increased funding for abstinence education so the playing field is level: According to a recent Heritage Foundation report, for every federal dollar abstinence educators receive, comprehensive sex educators get $12.

“A lot of people who work on abstinence from a public-policy perspective have known there’s a huge disparity,” said Heritage Foundation Fellow Melissa Pardue, who co-authored the study. “We felt we needed to lay it out. Before the president announced this, people were concerned that the liberals in Congress would take money away from the abstinence programs.”

They still might—but not if congressmen like Florida’s Dave Weldon get their way. Weldon, a medical doctor, is committed to seeing the president’s wishes brought to fruition.

“Dr. Weldon understands that it’s been 30-plus years of the federal government funding condom-promotion programs that hope to normalize adolescent sex,” Weldon aide Paul Webster told Citizen. “We’re not necessarily surprised about the disparity, but we’re going to work on getting people to understand that abstinence is a public-health approach to the problems adolescents face.”

?WHO TO CONTACT: Read the entire results of the Zogby survey at www.whatparentsthink.com. Then share that information with your federal representative and two senators, and ask them to support abstinence-education funding when the matter is debated later this year. To find them, log onto www.citizenlink.org and click on the Action Center button. Then click “elected officials” and type in your ZIP code for a complete list of the people who represent you.

Kentucky Becomes 29th State to Say Unborn Are Victims Too

Kentucky became the 29th state to pass a fetal-homicide law in February—action that may have convinced members of the U.S. Senate to consider a federal version of the law that will allow people convicted of harming a pregnant woman to face a second charge if her unborn child dies also. Arizona and Iowa are currently considering similar legislation.

Gov. Ernie Fletcher signed the Kentucky bill Feb. 27, after 18 years of lobbying from Kentucky Right to Life (KRTL). The group says passage was overdue; there were five fetal homicides in the state over the last five years, but nothing could be done without a law allowing charges when an unborn child is killed in the commission of a crime.

“There could only be a case brought for the mother,” KRTL Executive Director Margie Montgomery told Citizen. “There was one case where the baby died, but the mother was alive, and no case could be brought.

“One of our legislators had a media conference at the state Capitol in January, with several of the victims’ family members present, and … I think that prompted them [to pass it]. When you hear from people who’ve actually suffered from this trauma, it brings it home.”

Just one day before Fletcher signed the law, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act—also known as Laci and Conner’s Law, after the slain, pregnant California woman whose husband, Scott Peterson, is currently on trial for their murders. Though the legislation has passed the House three times over the last few years, it never reached the Senate floor until this session.

The Senate was scheduled to vote on the bill sometime during the week of March 22, as Citizen went to press. Democrats agreed they would not filibuster, meaning that only a majority vote was needed for passage.

WHO TO CONTACT: Thank the legislators who voted for the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. Send e-mail through the CitizenLink Action Center at www.citizenlink.org

Ohio Approves ‘Critical Analysis of Evolution’ Plan

The Ohio State Board of Education in March approved a lesson plan, “Critical Analysis of Evolution,” that encourages students to think critically about Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The state’s new 10th-grade lesson lets students examine the differences between microevolution, the nature of change within a species, and macroevolution, which postulates how life on earth came to be and is typically based on Darwin’s theory.

“The majority of the science community does indeed support the notion that microevolution extrapolates to macroevolution, but not all of them think there’s enough empirical evidence to support that,” said board member Deborah Owens-Fink. “This lesson makes that known to students.”

While each school district in Ohio must decide whether to follow the model, statewide tests tied to students’ graduation will be based on the curriculum.

Opposition to the plan was blistering.

“Approval of a defective model science lesson will advance the ‘wedge’ strategy of the Intelligent Design movement, whose purpose is to inject fundamentalist Christian beliefs into education,” wrote Robert Heath and Michael Herschler, president and president-elect respectively, of the Ohio Academy of Science, in a Feb. 23 letter to Ohio Gov. Bob Taft.

Owens-Fink said such claims are false.

“This is not intelligent design and no tenets of intelligent design are mentioned in this curriculum,” she said. “There is no religion whatsoever in the curriculum, no creationism and no biblical account.”

One supporter of the board’s action told the Dayton Daily News that science teachers have nothing to fear.

“If evolution is true, it can withstand the scrutiny. If it’s not, our students should learn to discern,” said Jack Chafin Jr., an architect from suburban Columbus.

Even so, Darwin-only science groups hinted at presstime they might sue the state to block the lesson plan.

Clem Boyd

UPDATE: Senior Citizens Win Back Right to Pray, Preach

Religious-freedom lawyers are crediting some persistent senior citizens in Balch Springs, Texas, for strengthening the legal protections of Christians nationwide.

Their battle began last August, when government officials told members of the city’s Senior Center that they had to stop praying before meals, singing gospel songs and preaching sermons—or else lose their free lunches.

But instead of backing down, the elderly residents took to the streets to fight for their religious rights, waving “Don’t mess with Grandma” signs in front of city hall. That caught the attention of a local religious-freedom group, the Liberty Legal Institute, which filed a lawsuit on their behalf last September (“Senior citizens battle for right to pray, sing,” Dispatches, January 2004).

Two months later, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) joined the effort, opening an investigation into whether the city had violated the seniors’ First Amendment rights as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids religious discrimination in public places.

“Senior citizens should not be forced to check their faith at the door in order to participate in city-run programs,” said R. Alexander Acosta, the DOJ’s assistant attorney general for civil rights.

Fearing hefty government fines, city officials caved. In a court settlement filed Jan. 8, they revoked their religious-activity ban and promised to pay the 16 plaintiffs $150 each in damages.

“These seniors are heroes,” Kelly Shackelford, Liberty Legal’s chief counsel, said. “Their victory sends a strong message to government officials around the country that they can’t get away with this.”

To celebrate, the seniors gathered at the center Jan. 12 to hear 73-year-old Rev. J.B. Barton read the Bible—as he had done for two decades before the city made him quit.

“The most important thing to me is getting back to bringing the Word of God to the people,” Barton told Citizen. “Christ is our hope … without Him, these people wouldn’t have anything to live for at all.”

Candi Cushman

?TAKE ACTION: Thank Balch Springs City Manager Mark Ewing for helping restore senior citizens’ religious-freedom rights. Phone 972-557-6063; e-mail mewing@cityofbalchsprings.com

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This article appeared in the May 2004 issue of Citizen magazine. Copyright © 2004 Focus on the Family. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.

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