Dear governor: Our kids need a safety net

No one should be surprised that Gov. Tim Pawlenty nixed an $850,000 federal teen pregnancy prevention grant while approving $500,000 in abstinence-only money. Hugely disappointed? Sure. Surprised? No.

Our governor joins many people who believe that telling teenagers not to have sex until marriage will keep them from having sex until marriage.

Yep.

Listen, I wish for a lot of things for my kids and your kids and the Pawlenty kids. I want them to wear their seat belts and write thank-you notes and visit their grandmothers and stay awake during class and never experiment with drugs and alcohol and never go over the speed limit and walk the dog like they promised and stop texting during dinner. If they weren't kids with raging hormones, an enviable sense of youthful entitlement and a blindness to their mortality, they might actually do a few of those things.

But they are kids and they desperately need a safety net. The governor just pulled that net out from under many our of children, including at-risk minority teens who experience higher rates of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases than their peers. By doing so, he shot himself in the foot.

The abstinence money will cost the state $379,000 in matching funds. The sex-ed money, nearly $1 million with no strings attached, would have provided teens with information on contraception and disease prevention, but also on compelling reasons to delay sexual activity.

One of the biggest myths around comprehensive sexuality education is that abstinence has no place. It does. Another myth, though, is that an abstinence-only discussion will usher all of our kids into a safe and healthy adulthood all by itself. It can't. (Please refer back to kids and raging hormones above.)

Yes, we should talk about the obvious benefits of abstinence or, at least, delayed sexual activity. Yes, we as parents or guardians should be our children's primary go-to people for advice, the sharing of values around sexuality and, if we're brave, a candid conversation about our own teenaged screw-ups. This is a discussion that should start long before kids hit their teen years, by the way.

But if they reject our heartfelt guidance (it's been known to happen), they'll still need accurate and nonjudgmental support, maybe more than ever. This includes resources on how to prevent pregnancy and how to avoid disease, something adolescent health educators are trained beautifully to do.

Their efforts work. The national Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), which monitors health risks among high-school students, shows the power of taking teens through a broad-based, biologically accurate curriculum. The survey's most recent 10-year data, from 1999 to 2009, shows encouraging trends on several fronts.

As school-based information increased, including around AIDS or HIV infection, the number of teenagers having sexual intercourse declined (from 50 percent in 1999 to 46 percent in 2009), as did the percentage of teens reporting four or more sexual partners (16.2 to 13.8). Fewer teens were currently sexually active and, of those who were, use of birth control was up. The percentage of students who said they drank alcohol or used drugs before having sex also was down, from 24.8 percent in 1999 to 21.6 percent in 2009.

These are all encouraging trends. But the numbers won't keep going down if the net is down, too.