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Book Review: Epidemic: Chastity trumps 'safe sex,' hands down

By Diane Levero

When Meg Meeker, a pediatrician specializing in adolescent medicine, left a large inner-city clinic in Wisconsin for private practice in 1987, she was determined to personally do something about the national crisis of teen pregnancy.

For the next 10 years, as Dr. Meeker relates in her book, Epidemic: How Teen Sex Is Killing Our Kids, she waged war on teen pregnancy, trying to keep her young clients from ending up in poverty and stunting their education by having babies.

Her weapons were oral contraceptives and later, Depo-Provera. She had plenty of backing: many doctors, teachers and public health officials were waging a similar battle with the same weapons, determined to bring down the country's sky-rocketing rate of teen pregnancies.

And teen pregnancy rates did drop somewhat from a peak of 80 per 1,000 in 1990 to 63 per 1,000 in 1997. But gradually, Dr. Meeker began to comprehend the awful truth: they had won the battle but lost the war.

Yes, fewer teen girls were getting pregnant. But in facilitating, and thus implicitly approving, early and promiscuous sex, the doctors, educators and officials had burst open a Pandora's Box of new and horrifying sexually transmitted diseases.

Back in 1970 doctors had had to contend with two sexual diseases: gonorrhea and syphilis. They could be cured with a shot of penicillin.

Today, thanks to the explosion in sexual activity precipitated by the pill and other contraceptives, there are scores of STDs, many of which are chronic or incurable.

With multiple strains of mutating viruses and the emergence of some antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the number of STDs may be as high as 80 to 100. For a variety of reasons, even through teenagers make up just 10 percent of the population, they incur 25 percent of these diseases.

Half of all 9th to 12th grade students have had sex. And an estimated one out of four of these sexually active teens is living with an SID truly a plague of epidemic proportions.

The dismal roll call of new SIDs includes:

• Chlamydia - Not even identified until 1976, today it's the most commonly transmitted SID in the country. About 1 in 10 teenaged girls and 1 in 20 teen boys have it.
• Genital herpes - More than 40 million Americans are infected with this virus. Herpes is a lifelong disease; difficult enough for adults, it can be devastating for teens.
• HIV and AIDS - By 1994 AIDS was the leading cause of death for people aged 25 to 40. HIV and other STDs are spread through oral sex, which is increasingly popular with teens.
• Human papilloma virus - HPV was identified in 1996 as the cause of 99.7 percent of all cervical cancers. Nearly 5,000 women die from it every year. Rates of HPV infection in teens can be as high as 40 percent, compared with less than 15 percent in the adult population.
• Pelvic inflammatory disease - By 1993 PID was being diagnosed in 1 million women a year. Among them were 200,000 teenagers, at least one-fourth of whom would suffer long-term damage.
• Hepatitis B - A serious virus that can cause chronic infection, liver scarring, liver cancer, liver failure and death, it commonly occurs in adolescents and young adults.

Gonorrhea, almost on its way out, made a come­back in the late 1990s. Now an estimated 650,000 cases are reported each year. Gonorrhea rates are highest among 15- to 19-year-olds.

Beyond the toll of physical diseases, says Dr. Meeker, teenage sexual activity routinely leads to emotional turmoil and psychological distress. According to one expert, one in eight teenagers is clinically depressed. Suicide is now the third leading cause of death in teenagers, behind accidents and homicides.

As adults, says Dr. Meeker, we have done a good deal to create this epidemic. We have pushed condoms as a way to have "safe sex," when they offer little or no protection against most SIDs.

Our kids are bombarded with sexually explicit movies, TV shows, music, and Internet pornography. The message they get is, if you're not having sex, there's something wrong with you.

In school their sex ed classes focus on sexual freedom rather than accurate information on STDs and on the benefits of self-control.

Dr. Meeker's ultimate message, however, is not one of despair. Studies and her own experience with her patients have convinced her that parents have extraordinary power in shaping their kids' sexual attitudes and behavior.

She offers parents concrete suggestions for developing the "connectedness" with their teens that will help them stay chaste.

A cautionary note: Dr. Meeker's approaches and solutions to the problem of teenage sex and its devastating physical and emotional consequences are strictly secular.

The words "immoral" and "sinful" do not appear in Epidemic, nor is there any reference to God's law or religious teachings. She does not say teens should wait until they're married to have sex; she says they should wait until they are older.

But by showing in purely secular terms what a fraud the mantra of "safe sex" with no consequences is, she meets and defeats Planned Parenthood and their ilk on their own turf. And offers pro-lifers some very valuable arrows for their quivers.