at the high school auditorium at 6:00 pm-this one's for parents, the kids get it the next day.

Texas Law requires that sex ed programs be abstinence-only. And the textbooks don't teach safe sex. Wondering about what that program and its founder are about? I noticed in doing a little research that the founder of Aim for Success, Marilyn Morris, was 17 when she got pregnant... before marriage. I suppose that gives her licence to tell others "Don't Do What I Did".

Did Marilyn Moore need to hear about sexual abstinence, or would information about birth control have served her better? Morris agrees that with condoms, she might not have gotten pregnant. But in the long run, she thinks, birth control would have damaged her more. "Chuck and I were on the verge of breaking up," she says. "Had I not gotten pregnant, we probably would have. Then I would have had another guy. And then another guy. Then another guy. It scares me to death to think who I would be today, because my self-image would have been torn apart as I gave myself to these guys."

So. She's saying she's the promiscuous type for whom marriage stopped her sleeping around like a tramp. Instead of, say, using birth control. Or practicing abstinence. Or, um, self-control!

Personally, I believe that children should either be taught about other forms of birth control, rather than trusting to luck, OR the schools ought to get out of the business of teaching sex ed. Or, a third choice, let those who want to have their children taught birth control as opposed to only abstinence get a CHOICE which class to send kiddo to.

NYTimes from July

Lost in the political rancor, however, is that teenagers throughout the country are both abstaining more, and, especially among older ones, more likely to use contraception when they do not abstain.

While the reasons are not all understood, government data show the trend began years before abstinence education became the multimillion-dollar enterprise it is today. Through a combination of less sex and more contraception, pregnancy and birth rates among American teenagers as a whole have been falling since about 1991. Texas, however, has seen the smallest decline despite receiving almost $17 million in the name of virginity.

Do the programs actually work?

In abandoning abstinence education, states have largely said that comprehensive sex education programs, which discuss contraception beyond the failure rates, have a better scientific grounding. New laws in Colorado, Iowa and Washington state that sex education must be based on