Also re: Tahujdt, its simple. "Abstinence education" is code for not explaining to kids how to properly have sex, so that they won't. Also yes, abstinence doesn't guarantee a lack of pregnancy but generally that would involve rape so its an irrelevant argument. Or I guess pulling out but its a very dumb definition of abstinence that includes that.
Right, because most rapists think to use condoms if they're properly educated as to contraception. That, and most rapist victims will insist that the rapist wear a condom.
Do they, actually? I don't know, and I'm reluctant to google that to find out.
Also, not explaining to kids how to have sex is not necessarily a bad thing. It may be slightly stupid, because it's dumb to think that they can't find, um, "walkthrough videos"* on the internet, but it's not bad.
*A man who came to speak to my theology class about addictions gave me this euphemism. He said that he referred to pornographic videos and literature as "training videos" and "training manuals".He was a really cool guy. He looked slightly anorexic, but revealed that he once had a really bad problem with binge eating for years and years before he got help. He was the kind of person you want giving that sort of talk.
Ok... I see where your coming from in interpreting what I'm saying but what I mean is that the words "abstinence education" refers to something specific, which is worse than what the actual phrase means. The rapist thing was just random conjecture on what the tumblr user might have been referring to.
Abstinence education is telling kids "never have sex ever". There are a lot of problems with this: teenagers ignore this advice, it often involves highly religious fear based arguments (the old dirty toothbrush speech for example), its not actually a bad thing for teenagers to have sex under the proper circumstances. The one big, serious problem though is that kids won't look up tutorials, or they won't look up the right tutorials, and they'll go and have sex without so much as a condom. Furthermore the sort of places that use abstinence only education tend to have parents who won't give their kids easy access to birth control, because at its core the issue is stopping premarital sex for religious purposes.
Its really not harmless, in fact its one of the worst things about the US public school system (and this is
me who's saying this). It demonstrably encourages teenage pregnancy and the spread of STDs.