THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Thanks to a combination of GOP lust for power and the evangelical/Baptist aversion to sex unless absolutely necessary, the State of Alabama is giant testbed for theories about Abstinence Only sex education. And not surprisingly, from the beginning it has proved to be a failure.

According to the most recent National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 50 percent of high school students in Alabama have had sex, and nearly half have had sex without condoms. Over the past few years, according to the Alabama Department of Health, people ages 13 to 24 are the only cohort in the state to see an increase in new HIV diagnoses. In 2013 people 13 to 24 accounted for almost half of new HIV infections in the state.

Alabama has high rates of STD infections. Data from the CDC in 2013 show that the state capital, Montgomery, had the highest STD rate in the nation. That year the state ranked third in the U.S. in numbers of chlamydial and gonorrheal infections, and the infection rate skyrockets in young adults 15 to 24 years old.

The CDC issued a report in December of last year criticizing middle school and high school sex education programs across the U.S. for not teaching all the recommended sexual health topics. The least covered topic, the report noted, was how to get and use condoms.

When Ali Simpson attended Vestavia Hills High School, a public school in an affluent neighborhood outside Birmingham, sex education was “100 percent abstinence only.” She graduated in 2011, and the last time she remembered a discussion about sexual health was in middle school. Her class gathered in the wrestling room. She said a woman entered and told a story about how she remained a virgin until marriage. Her husband, however, had had sex with one other person. “He gave her an STD that made her infertile, and that was her story about why not to have sex until marriage,” Simpson recalled many years later.

Alabama’s teen birth rate has dramatically declined since, from 61.8 births per 1,000 people ages 15 to 19 in 1991 to 34.3 in 2013; however, it’s still higher than the national average of 26.5.

Teens will have sex regardless of the promises they may have to make. And STD from Chlamydia to HIV are much cheaper to prevent with condoms that to treat with medicines later. But too many people think it is condoms and not human nature that will lead their children astray. And if they can not afford the treatment, some of them will watch their children die.