The Necessity of Latex Seat Belts

Jeremy Patrick (jhaeman@hotmail.com)

"Zeal without knowledge is fire without light."

We should not be spending tax dollars to teach our children to wear seat belts.

Doing so gives them the illusion that it's "okay" to drive recklessly and that the seat belt will always be there to protect them. Science proves that seat belts are not 100 percent effective, and it only takes one crash to ruin a life. When it comes down to it, there is no such thing as "safe driving." Wearing seat belts does not "prevent" traffic deaths, it only delays them. The only way to prevent children from becoming involved in traffic accidents is to teach them that driving is wrong and encourage them to abstain from it altogether.

Of course, we're not really talking seat belts and driving here. This is the exact kind of logic used by some conservatives to prevent schools from teaching about condoms, birth control and other methods of safer sex.

In the earliest days of combat aviation, the military refused to allow fighter pilots to wear parachutes. The idea was that if pilots were allowed a safe way to escape from being shot down, they would either be less cautious with their expensive planes or would intentionally get shot down in order to parachute into a neutral country and sit out the rest of the war. The result, obviously, was that hundreds of pilots who could have survived by bailing out died instead. If the logic is absurd when applied to seat belts and parachutes, why do people still use it when it comes to condoms?

On Friday, the State Board of Education refused to pass a measure that would include HIV/AIDS prevention education in its sex education program. The measure would have altered the state's abstinence-only education policy. Although local schools are still free to decide what they want to teach, the board will not dispense state or federal funds for it. John Diggs of the Family Research Council said teaching about condoms would encourage teen-agers to have sex, and Board Member Kathy Wilmot agreed with his concerns. (Lincoln Journal-Star, 4/7/01)

The result is that more kids will get STDs and become pregnant. Condoms, though not 100 percent effective, drastically reduce the transmission of STDs. In 1993 a study was published in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes that examined 245 couples in which one partner had HIV. Every couple who used condoms every time for four years prevented transmission of the disease. The disease was transmitted in at least 10 percent of the couples who did not use condoms every time. Similarly, studies prove that condoms drastically reduce the chances of pregnancy.

None of this matters to religious conservatives, however, who see premarital sex a sin in itself. They think that by refusing to teach about condoms they will succeed in encouraging abstinence. The facts show differently. Deborah Haffner argues that "there is no reason to believe that these claims are true. There are no published studies in the professional literature indicating that abstinence-only programs will result in young people delaying intercourse."

A number of studies have established that providing condoms increases condom use among sexually-active students while having no effect on the number of students who abstain. This makes perfect sense; so far as I know, reckless driving has not drastically increased since seat belts were installed in cars.

This does not mean, of course, that we should refuse to provide all of the facts. Students also need to be taught the problems with condoms and birth control, including statistical evidence of their failure rate. This is the only way to foster good decision-making.

As Bertrand Russell said, "A person is much less likely to act wisely when he is ignorant than when he is instructed, and it is ridiculous to give young people a sense of sin because they have a natural curiosity about an important matter."

By refusing to teach students about proper condom use, we sacrifice the 54 percent of them who are having sex in the vain hope of convincing others to abstain.

Religious conservatives should be ashamed of themselves. Yet this is invariably the result when ideology triumphs over reality: kids die.

(c) Jeremy Patrick, 2001