The AMA wants better than "faith based"

and says "no evidence that abstinence programs work."

Christopher DeRienzo, a medical student from Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, N.C., who represents the nation’s medical students in the AMA’s House of Delegates, brought the community-based sex education issue to the AMA. The AMA already is on record supporting broad-based sex education programs that include information about contraception as well as information about abstinence. But DeRienzo says that community-based programs often have an abstinence-only curriculum that includes not only errors but also sexual stereotypes, such as teaching that girls are unable to “focus” when sexually aroused.

The medical students asked the AMA to make a flat statement that it was opposed “federal funding of community-based abstinence-only sex education programs and instead support federal funding of comprehensive sex education programs that teach about contraceptive choices and safe sex while also stressing the importance of abstinence in preventing unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.”

But the AMA delegates, who represent state medical societies as well as medical specialty societies, softened the language. Rather than saying the AMA is opposed to abstinence-only sex education programs, the new policy states that the AMA only supports programs that are evidence-based.

The change in wording was brokered by Billie Jackson, MD, a Macon, Ga., dermatologist who describes herself as a mother of teens. She says that there is evidence that an abstinence-only program in Jessup, Ga., “is effective and there is also evidence that an abstinence-based program in Washington, D.C., is effective. So, I think that in some communities, abstinence-based programs do work and so children should be told that they can just say no. And as physicians we should support programs that work.

To me, this sounds much like the pork-barrel DARE projects that are now highly discredited.

I can imagine that concentration camps for teens involved in sex might arise and make future ambassadors to Italy rich....