Republican Party of Virginia Treasurer Bob FitzSimmonds, a former aide to and “very close friend” of gubernatorial nominee Ken Cuccinelli II (R), told Virginia blogger Ben Tribbett that he is “not a big fan of contraception, frankly.”

FitzSimmonds — who was Cuccinelli’s legislative director during his time in the Virginia Senate, as well as a multiple-time state senate candidate himself — is the former executive director of what is now the Care Net Pregnancy Help Center and the former chair of the Virginia Crisis Pregnancy Center Directors Association. Crisis Pregnancy Centers are faith-based operations that seek to discourage pregnant women from considering abortion. He created an abstinence-only curriculum for area schools called the “Keep It Simple Say NO abstinence program“.

At last weekend’s state party convention, Tribbett asked FitzSimmon whether he supported the distribution of emergency contraception on college campuses. “I’m not a big fan of contraception, frankly,” the Republican Party official explained. “I think there are some issues, we’re giving morning-after pills to 12-year-olds, and pretty soon I guess we’ll hand them out to babies, I don’t know.”

Watch the video:

FitzSimmonds also told Tribbett that sex education has caused the spread of sexually transmitted diseases: “I believe that we don’t recognize the causal effect between the type of sex education that we’ve been giving and the spread of STDs. We focus on things like abortion, cause it’s a big pressure thing. I go into schools 15-20 times a year, I run a non-profit that goes into schools and talks to kids about sex. They’re all abortion and HIV. HIV’s kind of hard to catch. Abortion happens if you get pregnant. But we’re on the track for 50 percent of the American people to have Herpes by the time these kids are my age. And that is a profound — not only health but sociological crisis facing this country.”

FitzSimmonds posted on his Facebook page shortly after last November’s election, “When Obama is 90 years old and he dies and goes to Hell, he is going to say ‘This is all Bush’s fault.’”

(HT: BlueVirginia)

Illinois public schools will be required to include medically accurate information about birth control in their sex ed classes under a measure that the state legislature passed this week. HB 2675, which Gov. Pat Quinn (D) is expected to sign into law, will prohibit health classes from teaching abstinence-only curricula.

Illinois’ current law requires sex ed classes to emphasize abstinence as “the expected norm,” and stipulates that “course material and instruction shall stress that pupils should abstain from sexual intercourse until they are ready for marriage.” Public schools can choose between teaching abstinence-only education, using a mix of stressing abstinence while providing comprehensive information about birth control and condoms, or simply declining to provide any sex ed instruction. Under HB 2675, schools won’t be able to choose the abstinence-only option anymore — they’ll need to either offer comprehensive information about prevention methods, or decide not to offer any sex ed courses whatsoever.

State Sen. Linda Holmes (D) spearheaded the measure because she doesn’t believe that abstinence-only curricula adequately equips teens with the resources they need to safeguard their sexual health. “In fantasy land, we teach our kids abstinence — and they listen. But we know they don’t necessarily follow that advice,” Holmes explained. “They are going to be confronted with the issue of sex before they’re 21 years old, or 25, or whenever they decide to get married.”

Holmes is right. By their 19th birthday, seven in ten American teens will have had sex. And even the Americans who grow up in socially conservative communities aren’t delaying sex until marriage — by some estimates, 80 percent of unmarried evangelical Christians have had sex at least once. But when those young people become sexually active, they often don’t understand how to effectively protect themselves. Since abstinence-only classes often mislead students about the facts about contraception, 60 percent of young adults underestimate birth control’s effectiveness and are more likely to skip it because they don’t believe it will make a difference.

Abstinence education can also have lasting consequences for adolescents’ sense of self-worth. Because messages emphasizing abstinence and sexual purity often teach students that sexual activity is something be ashamed of, the youth who receive those messages may internalize those feelings of guilt and shame.

While banning abstinence-only education is a step in the right direction, HB 2675 still allows Illinois schools to opt out of providing any type of sexual health education. Luckily, some school districts in the state have already taken matters into their own hands to ensure their students will receive the information they need. Chicago’s public school system recently instituted a standardized policy for requiring age-appropriate comprehensive sexual health information in every grade.

Most U.S. states saw a dramatic drop in their teen birth rates between 2007 and 2011, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control. The national rate of teen births declined by 25 percent, and some individual states saw their rates drop by 30 percent or more:

Every single state except for West Virginia and North Dakota showed some kind of decline in the number of teenagers giving birth. But significant regional disparities remain. The CDC found that the lowest rates of teen births are in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Vermont — which each have rates under 17 births per 1,000 teen girls — while Arkansas and Mississippi have the highest rates at about 50 per 1,000. Overall, the highest rates of teen births continue to be concentrated in the South.

The CDC’s research builds on previous data that showed the United States’ teen pregnancy rate has plunged to record lows since 1991, largely because of adolescents’ expanded access to contraception. “Credit goes to teens themselves who are clearly making better decisions about sex, contraception, and their future,” Bill Albert, the chief program officer of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, told the Associated Press.

But those type of preventative health resources aren’t equally available to teens in every part of the country. Over the past decade, teen pregnancy rates have consistently been higher in Southern states that don’t provide students with adequate sexual health instruction. Since abstinence-only courses often present misleading information about contraception, a full 60 percent of young adults underestimate birth control’s effectiveness and are more likely to skip it because they don’t believe it will make a difference. And teens in rural areas still struggle to access contraception, partly because there are fewer health clinics in less populous places and partly because a societal stigma surrounding teen sexuality still pervades conservative communities.

Unfortunately, this correlation isn’t limited to teen pregnancy and teen births. Southern states that don’t offer comprehensive sex ed classes also have the highest rates of STDs.

As the United States has continued to grapple with addressing its teen pregnancy rates — which are higher than the rates in any other developed nation — there has been some debate over the best tactic to effectively lower the rate of unintended teen births. Public health campaigns to dissuade adolescents from becoming pregnant typically rely on shame-based tactics that tell young women they will be failures if they become pregnant. But there’s evidence to suggest that providing youth with the support they need through community programs, rather than shaming them about their sexuality, is actually a more effective way to encourage them to make healthy sexual choices.

The County of Los Angeles Department of Public Health wants to help promote safer sex practices by passing out one million and one condoms by the end of this year. In order to accomplish that goal, city officials are hitting the road — in a 40-foot “condom mobile” featuring the images of professional athletes reminding people to “suit up.”

Last year, the county’s health department sponsored its first-ever condom contest to give residents the opportunity to design an official Los Angeles branded condom wrapper. And now, the new bus will be handing out free condoms packaged in the winning design. The county has also partnered with local LGBT intramural sports leagues that will help them distribute additional free condoms.

This isn’t the first creative initiative to address California’s rising STD rates by expanding access and exposure to prevention methods. A new state-sponsored initiative called the “Condom Access Project” makes it easier for California teens tp obtain sexual health resources by allowing them to order free condoms online. And Los Angeles voters recently endorsed a measure requiring adult film stars to wear condoms on screen.

Education campaigns about safer sex may be especially necessary since not all of California’s students are receiving that type of instruction in school. Last year, the ACLU sued a Fresno County school for failing to provide accurate sexual health education to students. Students there were taught that sexually transmitted infections can be prevented by going out in groups with friends and getting plenty of rest.

This week, news broke that a Michigan school district is barring two teens from displaying their pregnant bellies in their school yearbook. The school district’s superintendent explained that depicting images of teen pregnancy in the yearbook goes against the school’s mission of “promoting abstinence.” One of the pregnant teens said she “went to the bathroom and cried” upon hearing the news.

Aside from the ironic fact that teens who receive abstinence-only education are actually more likely to become pregnant than the students who receive accurate sexual health information about prevention methods, the situation in Michigan also illustrates the pervasive negativity that Americans associate with teenage pregnancies. That attitude ultimately creates a environment that punishes, stigmatizes, and shames young mothers — many of whom are subject to much larger structural issues that are out of their control, like the type of sex education they received in school or the level of poverty they were born into.

Unfortunately, the situation in Michigan is hardly the only example of this dynamic in play. Here are five other instances of teen moms being shamed instead of supported:

1. A North Carolina high schooler’s photo won’t appear in her yearbook because she posed with her newborn son. One teen mom in North Carolina can relate all too well to the pregnant students in Michigan. After posing for a photo with her baby son, she was told that the picture wouldn’t be allowed to appear in the yearbook this year. The school claimed that the image would “promote teen pregnancy” and told the student she had two days to submit a different photo without her son. She declined, saying, “If he wasn’t going to be in it with me, I didn’t want be in it at all.”

2. One Louisiana high school banned pregnant teens from attending classes on campus altogether. Last year, a charter school in Louisiana received significant backlash for its policy forbidding pregnant students from remaining on campus. According to the school handbook, pregnant students were required to either switch to another school or begin a home school program — and if the school “suspected” a girl of being pregnant, administrators could force her to take a pregnancy test to find out for sure. After the ACLU stepped in to file a formal discrimination complaint, the Louisiana Department of Education ordered the school to drop its policy.

3. A celebrity-studded national campaign tells teens that being a mother is incompatible with being successful. Public service campaigns that stigmatize young parents are all too common. Teens are often bombarded with negative messages intended to dissuade them from having a baby at a young age — but instead of focusing on effective information about tools to prevent pregnancy, like information about where to access affordable birth control or other family planning support, these ads simply focus on how teen mothers’ lives are ruined. Many of them also have the added effect of dismissing parenthood altogether. A recent campaign from the Candie’s Foundation depicts celebrity’s faces alongside these messages, including Carly Rae Jepson proclaiming that being a mother prevents women from achieving great things:

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This month, West Virginia became the latest state to ban teen sexting. Under the state’s new law, minors are barred from making, having, or distributing material that portrays another minor in an “inappropriate sexual manner.” Those who come in violation of the law will be charged with “an act of delinquency” and, instead of being faced with criminal charges, will be required to enroll in an educational program to learn more about the potential long-term consequences of sexting.

West Virginia law already prohibited adults from sexting with minors — a situation that represents a clear abuse of power, and can fall under child pornography charges. The new measure goes further to restrict this type of sexual activity among peers. “I think it’s long overdue,” one parent told a local NBC affiliate. “I think [sexting] gets our [nation's] kids in a lot of trouble, gets them active in sex way earlier than they should be.”

That attitude is likely mirrored in the other states across the country that have imposed some legislation to address youth sexting. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, at least 20 states have enacted some kind of teen sexting measure. Some legislative pushes in this area have been a response to incidences of cyberbullying, and hope to prevent teens from distributing explicit photos in a way that is intended to cause emotional harm. The anti-sexting laws range from requiring schools to distribute educational materials about the dangers of sexting, to fining high schoolers for being in possession of an explicit photo on their cell phone, to serving teens with a misdemeanor change for texting a sexual image of themselves.

Of course, it’s incredibly important to make teens aware of the long-term consequences of their actions, encourage healthy sexual behavior, and crack down on cyberbullying. But punishing teens for their sexual activity isn’t necessarily the best way to go about accomplishing any of those goals. First of all, despite the media’s consistent hand-wringing over the perils of new technology and the corruption of American youth, sexting is not actually an inherently dangerous sexual activity. It’s not necessarily correlated to other types of more “deviant” behavior, either. And ultimately, sexting bans don’t proactively encourage teens to safeguard their sexual health.

That’s because this type of legislation doesn’t help foster a culture in which teens grow up learning how to respect themselves and others, make responsible choices, and honor their sexual partners’ consent. Instead, anti-sexting laws simply further the pervasive attitude that expressions of teen sexuality are always dangerous and shameful. As the failures of abstinence education programs have already demonstrated, stigmatizing sexual expression isn’t actually an effective way to keep teens safe, since it doesn’t encourage them to practice healthy behavior or feel comfortable enough to ask questions. And, if teachers and principals are empowered to confiscate students’ phones to investigate potential illegal behavior, anti-sexting laws could also create a high school environment where every teen is automatically a suspect.

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At the beginning of this month, mainstream media outlets began to run dire headlines proclaiming the spread of an aggressive “sex superbug,” quoting a doctor who claimed it could be “worse than AIDS.” The breathless proclamations of an impending public health crisis stemmed from a report — published by the Associated Press, among other outlets — that a rare strain of drug-resistant gonorrhea had been detected in Hawaii. That would have marked the first time that the HO41 strain, which doesn’t respond to the last-resort antibiotic currently used to treat the STD, had been discovered within the United States.

“This might be a lot worse than AIDS in the short run because the bacteria is more aggressive and will affect more people quickly,” Alan Christianson, a doctor of naturopathic medicine, was quoted as saying in response to the initial reports about HO41. That was enough to spark speculation about the disastrous implications of an impending “sex superbug.” But much of the recent reporting has been overblown. Here are the facts you need to know about this gonorrhea threat:

The initial reports about the rare strain of gonorrhea got it wrong. State health officials clarified that the strain of gonorrhea discovered in Hawaii wasn’t actually HO41 at all. It was a different version of the sexually transmitted infection, H11S8, which is resistant to a different kind of antibiotic — and which isn’t as serious of a threat, since it can still be treated with the drug currently used as a last resort against gonorrhea. The Associated Press ended up retracting its initial story.

It’s not actually worse than AIDS. After initial reports of the sex superbug began to circulate, public health officials quickly responded to clarify that it’s not helpful or accurate to compare drug-resistant gonorrhea to the global AIDS pandemic. Gonorrhea patients don’t usually die from the condition, while the rate of death from untreated AIDS is a staggering 98 percent. “I disagree with the general comparison,” Dr. Bruce Hirsch, a physician who treats infectious diseases at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., emphasized.

It was not caused by comprehensive sex education. Earlier this week, a conservative Christian radio host Matt Barber said that liberals in general, and comprehensive sex education specially, caused the new strain of drug-resistant gonorrhea. “By telling children, ‘Don’t do as I say, do as I do’ with comprehensive sex education giving a wink and a nod…hey, it’s a free-for-all,” Barber explained. “Well, we are reaping what we have sewn in this nation.” In fact, comprehensive sex education instruction that includes information about preventing the spread of sexually transmitted infections has been demonstrably successful at equipping American teens with the tools they need to protect their sexual health. The strains of gonorrhea that resist antibiotic treatment were actually caused by a combination of two factors: gonorrhea can mutate fairly quickly, which allows it to evade drug treatment, and we aren’t developing new drugs quickly enough to keep pace.

Drug-resistant gonorrhea is a real public health threat. Despite the fact that the initial story about HO41 was wrong, public health officials are still cautioning Americans that gonorrhea is, in fact, growing resistant to antibiotics — and that’s a real problem. It’s troubling that there’s only one antibiotic left that can effectively treat the infection, especially considering the fact that gonorrhea is the second most common STD in the United States. For months now, the CDC has been recommending “urgent action” to stop the spread of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, particularly by studying and developing new antibiotic treatments. The National Coalition of STD Directors believes it could be a matter of just another year or two before untreatable gonorrhea really does spread throughout the country.

The rise of antibiotic-resistant diseases isn’t limited to STDs. Even outside of gonorrhea, antibiotic resistance is becoming a serious global health threat. At the beginning of this year, public health experts in England began to warn of an impending “antibiotic apocalypse,” a not-so-distant future when even common infections aren’t able to be effectively treated with drugs anymore. Drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis and whooping cough are beginning to pose a potential threat, and there’s new evidence that the growing number of superbugs in U.S. meat can spread to Americans. Even though major medical organizations have advocated for making the development of new antibiotics an international priority, that research has lagged behind over the past several decades — partly because that type of innovation isn’t as profitable for Big Pharma companies.

Despite the fact that leading medical organizations agree that abortion does not actually put women at a higher risk for future premature births, North Carolina Republicans want to teach students otherwise. Under a measure that’s currently advancing in the state legislature, the state’s sex ed classes would be required to include scientifically disputed information about the risks of having an abortion.

The bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Warren Daniel (R), claims that SB 132 isn’t based on any kind of political ideology. “It’s based on the scientific evidence that you will have a future risk of preterm birth if you decide voluntarily to have an abortion,” Daniel told a Senate Health Committee earlier this week during the initial debate over SB 132.

But the medical professionals who testified against the measure disagree with that assessment. At the same committee hearing, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of North Carolina, Dr. David Grimes, called the proposed update to the state’s sex ed law “unnecessary and uninformed“:

“Senate Bill 132 would establish a state-sponsored ideology,” he said. “The statement is scientifically false.”

Grimes formerly directed abortion surveillance efforts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The World Health Organization, the CDC, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Academy of Pediatricians and the American Public Health Association all have uniformly concluded that abortion does not cause prematurity,” he told the committee. “How did they all get it wrong?”

There’s no good reason to amend the sex ed requirements that the state already has. According to a recent poll from the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina, 83 percent of parents in the state would like schools to continue providing sex education as currently defined under the Healthy Youth Act.

Nonetheless, the measure has already cleared a Senate committee and gotten approval from the full Senate. After this week’s heated debates, Daniel agreed to amend the legislation to add other risk factors for preterm birth — like smoking, drinking, drug use and poor prenatal care — to sexual health instruction. But SB 132 would still enshrine misinformation about abortion into state law. A final vote on the measure could come as early as Monday.

And SB 132 is hardly the only anti-choice legislation currently being considered in North Carolina. Republicans have also introduced a measure that would impose unnecessary, burdensome restrictions on abortion clinics that could ultimately force them to close their doors. At the end of March, hundreds of protesters gathered in the state capital to protest against the proposed clinic rules, telling their anti-abortion legislators that they have no right to interfere in women’s personal medical decisions. And just earlier this week, North Carolina also began advancing a bill that would force teens to get a notarized permission slip from their parents before being able to access sexual health services like birth control pills or STD tests.

A measure advancing in the North Carolina legislature would require teens to obtain notarized, written parental consent in order to access a range of health services, including testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, birth control prescriptions, pregnancy care, mental health counseling, and substance abuse treatment. HB 693 seeks to amend the state’s existing parental consent law — which already prevents teens from getting an abortion without permission from their parents — to extend to a broader range of medical care that lawmakers have deemed potentially inappropriate for minors.

HB 693 was approved by a GOP-controlled House committee on Tuesday. Since Republicans hold super majorities in both chambers of North Carolina’s legislature, the bill is expected to advance — and if it becomes law, North Carolina will be the first state to require such explicit parental consent for these types of health services. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 26 states allow all teens to consent to contraceptive services, and every single state currently allows minors to seek STD testing and treatment.

The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Chris Whitmire (R), claims it will simply help prevent “problems” from being repeated by involving parents in teens’ health decisions from the beginning. Other supporters of HB 693 argue that it will help “restore parental rights and lines of communication within families.”

But women’s health advocates point out that not every teen lives in a family that has healthy lines of communication, and the policy could be disastrous for minors in abusive households. “Here’s the bottom line: Everybody wants teenagers to talk to their parents, but public policy is not based on ideal families,” Paige Johnson, the vice president of external affairs for Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina, told the Huffington Post. “What if there’s something happening in the home, some kind of abuse going on? If teenagers can’t talk to their parents for whatever reason about their pregnancy or their STD or their substance abuse, they need to be able to access professional care.”

Doctors and health advocates testified against HB 693 on Tuesday, pointing out that imposing obstacles to health services could ultimately dissuade youth from seeking the medical care they need. In fact, studies have shown that when adolescents are required to seek out parental consent to access birth control and STD services, teen pregnancies tend to go up and teens’ willingness to seek out STD testing tends to go down. That’s particularly problematic considering the fact that the Centers for Disease Control has found that STDs disproportionately affect young people. In North Carolina specifically, half of all new reported cases of sexually transmitted infections occur among people between the ages of 15 and 24.

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Elizabeth Smart became a household name after she was kidnapped from her home in Salt Lake City, UT at the age of 14 and held in captivity for nine months. She was forced into a polygamous marriage, tethered to a metal cable, and raped daily until she was rescued from her captors nine months later. Smart was recovered while she and her kidnappers were walking down a suburban street, leading many Americans who followed her story on the national news to wonder: Why didn’t she just run away as soon as she was brought outside?

Speaking to an audience at Johns Hopkins about issues of human trafficking and sexual violence, Smart recently offered an answer to that question. She explained that some human trafficking victims don’t run away because they feel worthless after being raped, particularly if they have been raised in conservative cultures that push abstinence-only education and emphasize sexual purity:

Smart said she “felt so dirty and so filthy” after she was raped by her captor, and she understands why someone wouldn’t run “because of that alone.”

Smart spoke at a Johns Hopkins human trafficking forum, saying she was raised in a religious household and recalled a school teacher who spoke once about abstinence and compared sex to chewing gum.

“I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m that chewed up piece of gum, nobody re-chews a piece of gum, you throw it away.’ And that’s how easy it is to feel like you no longer have worth, you no longer have value,” Smart said. “Why would it even be worth screaming out? Why would it even make a difference if you are rescued? Your life still has no value.”

Now in her mid-twenties, Smart runs a foundation to help educate children about sexual crimes. She now believes that children should grow up learning that “you will always have value and nothing can change that.”

Social psychologists and sexual abuse counselors agree that comprehensive sex education can help prevent sexual crimes. Teaching children about their bodies gives them the tools to describe acts of abuse without feeling as embarrassed or uncomfortable, and it also helps elevate their self-confidence and sense of bodily autonomy. A shame-based approach to genitalia and sexuality, on the other hand, sends kids the message that they can’t discuss or ask questions about any of those issues.

Nonethless, abstinence-only education programs have a long history of imparting harmful messages that shame youth about their sexuality instead of teaching them the facts they need to safeguard their health. A high school in West Virginia recently made national headlines after hosting a conservative religious speaker who allegedly told students “if you take birth control, your mother probably hates you” and “I could look at any one of you in the eyes right now and tell if you’re going to be promiscuous.” In Smart’s home state of Utah — which is home to a large religiously conservative Mormon community — sex education is currently mandated, but lawmakers have repeatedly pushed to weaken the state law and reinstate an abstinence-only curriculum.