Moving from the perpetually pre-pregnant woman to the teenage pregnancy that caused shockwaves … News that Jamie Lynn Spears, the 16-year-old star of Nickelodeon’s popular “Zoey 101,” is pregnant sent the media into a tailspin this week over The Big Question: “What will parents tell their children?”

Without waiting for Nickelodeon to air a “sex special” next year hosted by Linda Ellerbee — “TV queen of talking to moppets about any subject that makes advertisers cringe!” notes Lisa de Moreas — parents might want to start by discussing the importance of sex education, and what can happen when contraception isn’t used or unexpectedly fails.

The Massachusetts teenagers quoted in this New York Times story on reaction to Spears’ pregnancy get what Spears’s own mom didn’t want to accept: teenagers have sex, even teenagers who make curfew.

Referencing the same NYT article, Tracy Clark Flory makes an excellent point about how Jamie Lynn Spears, who until now had been held up as the antidote to her older sister’s tabloid life, is being shamed.

“There are some dangerous assumptions being made here, namely that having sex at age 16 makes one unclean, a fallen angel, and that contraception never fails,” writes Flory. “So much of the ‘TV’s perfect girl is pregnant’ coverage focuses on the dilemma facing parents: How do they best discuss the news with their kids? It’s an important question, to be sure. I just hope the dichotomous angel vs. slut, smart vs. stupid context in this Times article isn’t representative of how parents are answering that call.”

The Chicago Tribune reports on a purity ball in Peoria, Ill. (video included), one of many purity balls held around the country at which daughters promise their virginity to their fathers until marriage.

“Girls are going into marriage with 12 sexual relationships. That brings so much baggage and regret that it breaks down the marriage,” said Janet Hellige, a volunteer who organizes the biannual Father-Daughter Purity Ball sponsored by The Christian Center in Peoria. “Girls have a wonderful gift to give, and we don’t want them to give all of themselves away. What we want them to do is present themselves as a rose to their husband with no blemishes.”

Nothing like the shaming of young women to spark a movement.

The story thankfully includes a thorough assessment of the failure of abstinence only programs — noting, for example, that teen pregnancy rates have dropped 36 percent since peaking in 1990, largely because teens are having safer sex, not no sex. (A side note: check out this story published Thursday on the increase in the birth rate for teenagers age 15-19 — the latest numbers show that the birth rate increased 3 percent in 2006, the first increase since 1991).

Interestingly, the founder of the first purity ball said promoting abstinence wasn’t the focus.

“This was birthed out of our home, not the abstinence movement,” said Randy Wilson, who has five daughters and two sons, and who with his wife, Lisa, founded Generations of Light, a Christian ministry in Colorado Springs. “It is a fatherhood event, not a virginity or abstinence event. We don’t think it’s appropriate to put that weight on the daughter’s shoulders.”

But Generations of Light is hardly offering a radically enlightened experience. At its purity balls, each father pledges to “cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity.”

The father refers to himself in the pledge as “the high priest in my home,” while daughters are to be “cherished as regal princesses.”

Not exactly the terminology that comes to mind when advocating for healthy father-daughter relationships.

Mary Zeiss Stange, a professor of women’s studies at Skidmore College, offers a feminist critique that gets to the heart of the problem:

“These events represent an idea that there is something about female sexuality that needs to be controlled by dominant men in the household,” said Stange. “That relates to a patriarchal position in the evangelical movement that not only defines female sexuality but females themselves as property. What happens with purity balls is, in effect, the daughter becomes her father’s property until he hands her off to her husband.”

Meet the new class of objectified 6-year-olds, stars of VH1′s “Little Beauties: Ultimate Kiddie Queen Showdown,” a documentary billed as a “light-hearted look into the wonderful world of children’s beauty pageants through the eyes of four, precocious six-year old girls.”

If that isn’t enough to turn your stomach, check out VH1′s list of what viewers will be privy to, including spray tanning sessions and fake teeth fittings. The show has also annoyingly given the girls descriptors, like “the flirt” or “the diva.”

A 6-year-old flirt. Nice.

As Samhita writes, “Please, just stop pornifying, beautifying, and making over our 6 year old girls!!!”

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report on suicide trends among those ages 10-24 in the United States, updated with 2004 data. Alarmingly, the suicide rate appears to have increased 8% from 2003 to 2004 after a period of decline, having decreased 28.5% from 1990 to 2003. A CDC press release notes it as “the biggest annual increase that we’ve seen in 15 years.”

After breaking the data down by sex and age, three groups stood out as having significantly increased suicide rates compared with 2003 – females 10-14 years, females 15-19 years old, and males 15-19 years old. Although suicide rates remain higher in boys, the largest percentage increase was in the group of girls who were 10 to 14.

The researchers also found that the methods by which young women committed suicide have changed – while firearms used to be the most common method for both sexes, hanging/suffocation is now the most common method for girls.

The editors note that it is not yet clear whether this finding is a single-year anomaly, or whether the rate will continue to increase – the FDA’s initial warnings about a possible increase in suicide risk in teens taking certain antidepressants happened in 2004, the year of this new data. They also express concern about changing risk factors for suicide and increased use of readily available means (such as hanging), and point out the lack of available insight into young female suicide:

Scientific knowledge regarding risk factors for suicide in young females is limited. Research that focuses on suicide mortality has emphasized males, who constitute approximately three fourths of suicide decedents aged 10–19 years. In contrast, research on suicidal behavior among females primarily has examined factors related to suicidal thoughts and nonfatal self-inflicted injuries.

If you or a loved one need help with this issue, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline toll-free at 1-800-273-TALK to speak with a counselor and be referred to a local crisis center. You may also want to view this fact sheet on recognizing suicidal behavior and guide for parents.

Miranda Spencer watches the “Miss Teen USA” pageant on NBC so you don’t have to.

Never mind that today’s “Miss Teen USA” pageant sets feminism back 40 years, back when airlines had slogans like, “I’m Kimberly. Fly me!” Or that, creepily enough, you can buy photos of the bikini-clad high schoolers on the pageant website. These young women are being proferred as role models.

I can only think of my spunky, whip-smart 12-year-old cousin Jenny, and hope her TV was broken last night. She doesn’t need to know that in a few years she’ll be old enough for NBC to pimp her out to America.

The photo part kills me. The pageant website also presents a list of beauty tips that seems to miss its demographic: Who knew so many teens needed help reducing the appearance of cellulite?

And yet it ends with this ironic tip: “Always be true to your inner voice. It’s your personality, strength, accomplishments, intelligence, and self-confidence that will radiate from within and make the world notice the extraordinary you!”

Oh, we only wish.

It’s the topic of today’s “Talk of the Nation” on NPR. Guests include Wendy Shalit, author of “Girls Gone Mild,” and Amy Dickerson, “Ask Amy” columnist of the Chicago Tribune.

One of the first callers, a father and middle school teacher who criticizes his female students’ clothes, will really endear himself to listeners (heh). Amy steps up and does a nice job.

First, a big thank you to Rachel Walden of Women’s Health News for guest blogging while I was collecting rocks on the beaches of Cape Cod. She’s spectacular, so make sure to visit her site regularly.

Now, what would a return to blogging be without a return to modesty? Anne K. Ream writes in the L.A. Times about the growing “modesty movement,” as reflected by websites like Modestly Yours, Modesty Zone and DressModestly.com, which promotes a “chaste but chic” dress code for teens.

“They call themselves sexual revolutionaries, but that might be something of a misnomer: In their world, abstinence is the order of the day and female virtue is the best way to ensure female safety,” writes Ream, founder of Voices and Faces Project and co-founder of Girl360. Her critique continues:

The mother of the modesty movement is Wendy Shalit, whose 1999 book, “A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue,” argues that today’s young women have reverted to an earlier mode of femininity, deciding that in the face of sexual excess, chastity is the ultimate 21st century rebellion.

No one would argue that the right to say no to sex isn’t a good thing. And surely we can agree that talking to girls about the value of their bodies, and their selves, is a welcome cultural shift. But when Shalit argues that “many of the problems we hear about today — sexual harassment, date rape … are connected to our culture’s attack on modesty,” she is making a dangerous leap.

It’s not a lack of female modesty but a sense of male entitlement that leads to sexual violence. And the idea that we women can change men’s behavior by changing our clothes is not only disconcerting, it has been debunked. As millions of women know all too well, no one ever avoided a rape by wearing a longer skirt. [...]

Scratch the surface, and what’s supposed to be good for girls reveals itself to be all about the boys: dressing in a way that doesn’t over-excite them, demurring so that their manhood remains intact and holding tight to our sexuality until we find a husband who is worthy of that ultimate “prize.”

What’s lost in this view of the world is the power of female desire: not just sexual and sartorial but professional and intellectual. There is something liberating about a girlhood (and womanhood) that is not lived solely in anticipation of, or in response to, a man. There’s something freeing about a world in which women have the right to take risks (and to get mad).

While boys may be marketed the British “The Dangerous Book for Boys,” concludes Ream, there’s no equivalent for girls: “I guess the fairer sex will have to satisfy itself with Shalit’s latest tome: ‘Girls Gone Mild.’”

Speaking of “The Dangerous Book for Boys,” Charles McGrath had a very funny take on it in Sunday’s New York Times. The film rights have just been bought.

In a Washington Post review of Wendy Shalit’s new book, “Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good,” Jennifer Howard writes that Shalit engages in “some very dubious sociology.” Here’s my favorite part:

Even more detached from reality is Shalit’s takedown of older feminists. These are the good ladies, second- and third-wavers, who run organizations such as NOW and who have fought for years to give women the same chances as men — not, as Shalit would have it, just the chance to sleep around like men. She attacks them for “the concessions they made to pornography” and for being “so committed to the idea of casual sex as liberation” that they’re baffled by younger, more restrained women.

“As the third-wavers continue to advocate a public, crude sexuality and younger girls feel oppressed by how public sexuality is, the two sets of women are on course for an inevitable collision,” Shalit writes. This is bone-headed conservatism at its most offensive. Last time I checked my Feminist Manual, letting it all hang out in public didn’t appear on the must-do list. Nor did making concessions to pornographers, but maybe I missed that section. Shalit would have us believe that feminism is not a dirty word in her vocabulary. Yet she seems surprised when a Wesleyan undergraduate “rejects sexual exhibitionism even though she identifies as a feminist.”

Imagine that! A feminist who doesn’t take her clothes off. What is this world coming to?

For more on Shalit’s book and the younger women she quotes, see Jessica Valenti’s post from July.

Rachel Kramer Bussel interviews Heather Corrina, a 37-year-old Seattle resident who for the past eight years has been providing teens with non-judgmental and accurate information about safer sex via her website, Scarleteen.com.

Corrina has a new book out, “S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College.”

Asked how her identity as a feminist factors into her sex-ed philosophy, Corrina replies:

It has a pretty strong influence. One of the biggest errors we see with both sex education and with cultural sexual ethics and practices is that it’s usually done in the context of the prevailing oppressions. For instance, most sex ed is glaringly heterosexist, and presumes a heterosexual default. Much of it is overtly or covertly noninclusive when it comes to class, race, sex, gender and orientation.

Sex is often framed with some pretty decrepit and dangerous gender roles and stereotyping: assuming or encouraging female passivity or male dominance in sex and relationships, heralding vaginal intercourse as a be-all-end-all, setting the male/female romantic relationship above and beyond all others, presenting sexuality — particularly for women — as something a partner gives to you, or you to them, rather than something which exists all on its own and is sometimes chosen to be shared.

We don’t get to decide if society oppresses us as a class, be that by sex, by orientation, by color, by economic class. But we absolutely do get to decide that we are only going to be in intimate, interpersonal relationships based on equality. So, even though women are still taught to be largely passive sexually — even the vagina, a very active muscle, is more often presented as a passive receptacle than not! — we can see the negatives in that, for women and men, and opt for better.

*Sigh.* If only government-funded websites were written by smart, thoughtful sex educators …

Emma Watson is; Hillary Duff is not. Because that would be, like, icky.

Human Genome Project Yields Important Results: “In a long-delayed harvest from the human genome project, researchers say they have found six new sites of variation in the genome that increase the risk of breast cancer,” reports The New York Times. “Together with already known genes, the discovery means that a sizable fraction of the overall genetic risk of breast cancer may now have been accounted for, researchers say, and much of the rest could be captured in a few years.”

Nicholas Wade continues: “The findings do not point to any new treatment and are too little understood to serve as the basis of a diagnostic test. But they are a critical step toward understanding the biology of breast cancer, scientists say, from which new treatments should emerge.”

Dairy Council to No Longer Promote Milk’s Link to Weight Loss: Also from the NYT: “A national advertising campaign that associates dairy products with weight loss will be curtailed because research does not support the claim, according to the Federal Trade Commission. The advertisements, conceived by the promotional arm of the dairy industry and overseen by the Agriculture Department, feature slogans like ‘Milk your diet. Lose weight!’ and suggest that three servings of dairy products a day can help people be slim.”

Report Links Discriminatory Beliefs Against Women with Vulnerability to AIDS: A new study released by Physicians for Human Rights connects “widespread discriminatory views against women in Botswana and Swaziland to sexual risk-taking and, in turn, to extremely high HIV prevalence.”

The study, Epidemic of Inequality: Women’s Rights and HIV/AIDS in Botswana & Swaziland: An Evidence-based Report on Gender Inequity, Stigma and Discrimination, reports that 75 percent of HIV-positive 15- to 25-year-olds in sub-Saharan Africa are female.

How Much More “Proof” is Needed?: A California district attorney is under fire for refusing to bring charges against members of the De Anza College baseball team involved in the rape of a 17-year-old girl who was nearly passed out from drinking during the time of the assault. Three young women pushed their way into the room where the girl was being assaulted by one man as seven other men looked on. The women took the victim to the hospital, but could not identify the person assaulting the girl.

California National Organization for Women and the National Coalition Against Violent Athletes have protested in front of the District Attorney Dolores Carr’s office in San Jose, demanding she reconsider, and the girl at the center of the case said this week that she wants her day in court. Carr insists that there’s not enough evidence to bring charges, in part because the team members are not cooperating and witnesses have provided different accounts of what took place. Read more at Broadsheet.

Foreign Correspondents and Sexual Abuse: “Women have risen to the top of war and foreign reportage. They run bureaus in dodgy places and do jobs that are just as dangerous as those that men do. But there is one area where they differ from the boys — sexual harassment and rape,” writes Judith Matloff at Columbia Journalism Review. “Female reporters are targets in lawless places where guns are common and punishment rare. Yet the compulsion to be part of the macho club is so fierce that women often don’t tell their bosses.”

Men Make More Money than Women on Kibbutzim: “Although the communal farms were once thought of as egalitarian communities, the current reality shows a different picture,” according to a study by professors at the University of Haifa’s Institute for Research on the Kibbutz. “Fifty-three percent of male kibbutz members earn more than the NIS 7,300 monthly average gross wage, while only 23% of women members do so. 66% of the men think their work provides a proper livelihood while only 47% of the women do.”

New York’s Schools for Pregnant Girls Will Close: “The schools’ demise, like their origins, may be a sign of changing times,” reports The New York Times. “Pregnancy schools across the country appear to be slowly fading away, partly stemming from the decade-long declining rate of teenage pregnancy and partly because of the idea that the girls should not be segregated from other students.”

Urban Theater Puts Teens Center Stage: “At a time when young women are often the silent subject of a cacophonous public debate — the scandal over radio host Don Imus, sex education in public schools, accusations of misogyny directed toward hip-hop culture — ViBe Theater Experience provides them the chance to speak for themselves,” Courtney Martin writes at Women’s eNews. The 5-year-old theater group has produced 15 full-length plays for more than 4,000 audience members and has worked with more than 100 urban teens between the ages of 13 and 19.

Wish List: “Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks”: I just came across this review, though it looks like “Girls Who Bite Back” was first published a few years ago. Definitely a must for the summer-reading pile!

They are well-worn platitudes: Image is everything in modern society. Women are nothing but sex objects in our mediated world. Yet I guarantee these familiar phrases will take on a new meaning and depth after you read Allison Stokke’s horror story.

By day, Stokke, 18, is a star track athlete at her California high school and a national record holder in the pole vault. But on the Internet, Stokke has become another objectified young woman who has no control over her image.

The Washington Post has a disturbing front-page account of how the star athlete found herself the subject of unwanted attention. The wave began when a popular sports blog — which also post photos of “hot chicks” — published, without permission, a photo of Stokke that was taken by a sports journalist for a California prep track website. Dozens of blogs and websites either re-posted or pointed to the photo, according to the Post.

“Within days, hundreds of thousands of Internet users had searched for Stokke’s picture and leered,” writes Eli Saslow.

And Stokke, who two years ago successfully got a photo of herself removed from a message board when a fan posted it along with a lewd comment, soon realized that this situation was far beyond her control. A search for her name in Yahoo! revealed almost 310,000 hits, writes Saslow. “It’s not like I could e-mail everybody on the Internet,” Stokke said.

And you can imagine how crude the comments have been. Now Stokke is afraid to leave the house alone and her father, a lawyer, scans message boards each day for potential stalkers. Saslow does a very good job explaining the degree of violation and its effect on Stokke and her family:

For the first week, Stokke tried to ignore the Internet attention. She kept it from her parents. She focused on graduating with a grade-point average above 4.0, on overcoming a knee injury and winning her second state title. But at track meets, twice as many photographers showed up to take her picture. The main office at Newport Harbor High School received dozens of requests for Stokke photo shoots, including one from a risqué magazine in Brazil.

Stokke read on message boards that dozens of anonymous strangers had turned her picture into the background image on their computers. She felt violated. It was like becoming the victim of a crime, Stokke said. Her body had been stolen and turned into a public commodity, critiqued in fan forums devoted to everything from hip-hop to Hollywood.

After dinner one evening in mid-May, Stokke asked her parents to gather around the computer. She gave them the Internet tour that she believed now defined her: to the unofficial Allison Stokke fan page (http://www.allisonstokke.com), complete with a rolling slideshow of 12 pictures; to the fan group on MySpace, with about 1,000 members; to the message boards and chat forums where hundreds of anonymous users looked at Stokke’s picture and posted sexual fantasies.

“All of it is like locker room talk,” said Cindy Stokke, Allison’s mom. “This kind of stuff has been going on for years. But now, locker room talk is just out there in the public. And all of us can read it, even her mother.”

And now the student who was recruited by the nation’s top schools will begin her college career having already been stripped of her privacy.

“Even if none of it is illegal, it just all feels really demeaning,” Stokke told the Post. “I worked so hard for pole vaulting and all this other stuff, and it’s almost like that doesn’t matter. Nobody sees that. Nobody really sees me.”

Check out these titles for some good reading:

Full Frontal Feminism: Interviews with Jessica Valenti, executive editor of Feministing.com and author of the new “Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters,” ran last week at AlterNet, Salon and New York magazine.

Huffington Post is running a book excerpt, along with Valenti’s touching explanation for why the book is dedicated to “Miss Magoo.” And Valenti’s six-point manifesto for becoming a feminist is posted at The Guardian. In it she writes:

“I wanted to write the book I wish I’d read as a teenager. A book that would cut through the nonsense stereotypes and tell it like it is. A book that would talk about how amazing it is to be a feminist. And how necessary. Because I truly do believe that feminism is necessary for women to live happy, fulfilled lives — especially given the society we live in, which constantly and consistently tells women that we’re just not good enough.”

Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: Courtney Martin, a contributor to Feministing.com and other media outlets, is getting lots of press for “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body.”

Writing in The New York Times, Holly Brubach calls it, “a smart and spirited rant that makes for thought-provoking reading.”

“She opens with some sobering statistics,” continues Brubach, “seven million American girls and women with eating disorders, and up to 70 million people worldwide.”

Brubach goes on to quote from the book: “Ninety-one percent of women recently surveyed on a college campus reported dieting; 22 percent of them dieted ‘always’ or ‘often.’ In 1995, 34 percent of high-school-age girls in the United States thought they were overweight. Today, 90 percent do.”

How Sassy Changed My Life: Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer, co-authors of “How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time,” appeared on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” last week to discuss the magazine described on the program as the “antithesis of the homecoming queen, please-your-boyfriend culture. It published articles about suicide and STDs while Seventeen was still teaching girls how to get a boy to notice you.”

NPR has also published an excerpt from “How Sassy Changed My Life.” More at Venus and Media Bistro.

World Bank May Target Family Planning: “Under beleaguered President Paul D. Wolfowitz, the World Bank may be scaling back its long-standing support for family planning, which many countries consider essential to women’s health and the fight against AIDS,” reports the Los Angeles Times.

“In an internal e-mail, the bank’s team leader for Madagascar indicated that one of two managing directors appointed by Wolfowitz ordered the removal of all references to family planning from a document laying out strategy for the African nation,” the story by Nicole Gaouette continues. “And a draft of the bank’s long-term health program strategy overseen by the same official makes almost no mention of family planning, suggesting a wider rollback may be underway.”

Noting that it “sounds like possible plot from a Dan Brown novel,” the Women’s Bioethics Project points to The Guardian’s coverage of the World Bank story, which notes that the World Bank’s managing director who allegedly ordered the removal is said to have links to the Roman Catholic sect Opus Dei.

International Planned Parenthood Federation has started a letter-writing campaign in response to the World Bank’s actions.

Popular Health-Insurance Plans Punish Women: “High-deductible health insurance plans favored by many employers often wind up being an unfair burden to women, a new study says, largely because women need many routine medical exams that quickly add up,” reports the Associated Press. “The median expense for men under 45 in these plans was less than $500, but for women it was more than $1,200, according to a study by Harvard Medical School researchers.” Loved the sub-hed: “Females charged more for having reproductive organs, Harvard study finds”

High Health Costs Hit U.S. Women Harder: “American women are more likely than men to go without needed health care, because they can’t afford it, a new report finds,” reports Health Day News. “The report was released Thursday by the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation advocating for improvements to the U.S. health system, and prepared by researchers at the National Women’s Law Center.” The study is available online.

School Ban on Anti-Gay T-Shirt Upheld: “A U.S. District Court Judge on Tuesday ruled in favor of Neuqua Valley High School’s attempts to ban a student from wearing a ‘Be Happy, Not Gay’ T-shirt. The senior wanted to wear the shirt as part of a national effort this week by Christian students to publicly oppose homosexual behavior,” reports the Chicago Tribune. Alliance for Justice, the group representing the student, plans to appeal. School officials banned the same shirt last year, prompting the student’s lawsuit.

Trust Us, We’ve Noticed: Salma Hayek tells Marie Claire (via MSNBC’s Jeannette Walls): “I think it’s terrible women are put in that position. Motherhood is not for everyone — it is for me, but there’s no reason women should feel rushed to have a child … I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but society thinks if you don’t have children, you’ve failed as a woman, even if you are CEO of a company. You’ve got to be beautiful, smart, skinny, tall, rich, successful at your job, married to the right guy — and have genius children.”

Happy Sweet 16, Teen Voices!: Feministing interviews Tori Costa, marketing director of the Boston-based Teen Voices magazine, an international feminist magazine that’s kicking off its 16th birthday with its April issue.

Barbie, At Age 48, Gets Another Makeover: “Over the years, [Mattel] has tried dozens of small changes and a few big ones. There was the reduction in bust size, a gritty new urban look with a reduction in skirt length, and, of course, there was the big breakup with longtime paramour Ken,” reports the Chicago Tribune. “On April 26, the world’s largest toy maker will unveil Barbie Girls, its first big new Barbie concept in four years.”

Key Health and Health Care Indicators: Kaiser Family Foundation released a data update this week looking at disparities in infant mortality, diabetes-related mortality and AIDS cases among African Americans and Hispanics in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It also provides similar breakdowns showing the percentage of each group in each state that is uninsured, enrolled in Medicaid and living in poverty.

Plus: KFF has a transcript, video and podcast of a recent discussion of of Jonathan Cohn’s new book “Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis — and the People Who Pay the Price.” Participants include Cohn, Susan Dentzer, senior health correspondent of “Newshour with Jim Lehrer,” and Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute.

FYI: “A fruity cocktail may not only be fun to drink but may count as health food, U.S. and Thai researchers said on Thursday,” reports Reuters. “Adding ethanol — the type of alcohol found in rum, vodka, tequila and other spirits — boosted the antioxidant nutrients in strawberries and blackberries, the researchers found. Any colored fruit might be made even more healthful with the addition of a splash of alcohol, they report in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture.”

The story concluded with a little humor not typically found in Reuters health news: “The study did not address whether adding a little cocktail umbrella enhanced the effects.”

“In an emerging revolt against abstinence-only sex education, states are turning down millions of dollars in federal grants, unwilling to accept White House dictates that the money be used for classes focused almost exclusively on teaching chastity,” the Los Angeles Times reported this week.

Those states are on to something.

On Friday, a report produced by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. for the Department of Health and Human Services noted the ineffectiveness of abstinence-only education. The study is available here in its entirety (PDF); here’s an overview that describes the impact of the four abstinence education programs under review. From the executive summary:

Findings indicate that youth in the program group were no more likely than control group youth to have abstained from sex and, among those who reported having had sex, they had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same mean age. Contrary to concerns raised by some critics of the Title V, Section 510 abstinence funding, however, program group youth were no more likely to have engaged in unprotected sex than control group youth.

Scott Swenson at RH Reality Check has the reaction from all sides:

“This report should serve as the final verdict on the failure of the abstinence-only industry in this country,” said William Smith, vice president for public policy of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS). “It shows, once again, that these programs fail miserably in actually helping young people behave more responsibly when it comes to their sexuality,” Smith continued.

In 1996, the federal government attached a provision to the welfare reform law establishing a federal program for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. This program, Section 510(b) of Title V of the Social Security Act, dedicated $50 million per year to be distributed among states that choose to participate. States accepting the funds are required to match every four federal dollars with three state-raised dollars (for a total of $87.5 million annually, and $787.5 million for the eight years from fiscal year 1998 through 2006). Programs that receive the Title V funding are prohibited from discussing methods of contraception, including condoms, except in the context of failure rates.

On a call yesterday organized by the Abstinence Clearinghouse, abstinence-only proponents were clearly rocked by the potentially ruinous news in the report. High profile abstinence-only advocate, Robert Rector, led the preemptive damage-control planning. He outlined several strategies the abstinence-only movement could use to rationalize the findings in the report saying, “The other spin I think is very important is not [program] effectiveness, but rather the values that are being taught,” Rector said. Whether or not these programs work is a “bogus issue,” Rector continued.

How bogus? 10 years worth of public funding to the tune of $1.5 billion.

And the value of disseminating ineffective and sometimes dangerous and demeaning misinformation (PDF)? Priceless.