(This article courtesy of Agape Press.)
by Jim Brown
A respected physician practicing child and adolescent medicine is warning that sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among adolescents have reached epidemic proportions. One reason, she says, is that people are not staying informed.
Dr. Meg Meeker, author of a new book titled Epidemic: How Teen Sex is Killing our Kids, says America is in the midst of its first “politically incorrect” epidemic in history. She says by promoting teenage sexual promiscuity, public school sex educators and liberal media have created an STD epidemic among adolescents.
“What we know right now is that what we've been doing for the past fifteen to twenty years, which is condom-based education, isn't working because STDs are on the rise,” Meeker says. “And I think people believe that abstinence programs are run by people who aren't informed of the medical facts which is certainly not true and [by] people who believe that sex is a bad thing, which also isn't true.”
Many parents, the physician says, do not understand the extent of the STD epidemic in America. She says physicians, in particular, are not paying adequate attention to what is happening among teenagers.
“There is information on the [Centers for Disease Control] website and the [National Institutes of Health] website, but unfortunately a lot of people aren't going to [those sources] in the evening,” she says.
“Instead, they're sitting down and watching Hollywood which, of course, is teaching us that sex is everywhere and it's fine for anybody to be having sex, particularly teenagers, without any kind of consequences. So I think a lot of it is that people aren't really paying attention.”
Meeker says the public needs to realize that any educational efforts have to be aimed at curbing teen sex because from a physician’s standpoint, she says, that is the only way to keep STDs out of the lives of young people.