How's That "Safe Sex" Working For You?

I'm an 80s girl raised by a couple of Rat Pack 60s parents. Safe sex for me was not getting caught. Yet, when STD rates continue to rise, and my pediatrician wants to inoculate my 8-year old daughter against HPV, I have to ask, "how's that 'safe sex' working for you?" According to the CDC, in a first of its kind study,

• At least one in four teenage girls in the United States has a sexually
  transmitted disease, amounting to 3.2 million youth.
• About half of the girls admitted ever having sex, and among them, the
  rate of STD infection was 40 percent, researchers found.
• Even among girls reporting only one lifetime partner, one in five (20.4%) had at least one STI. Girls with three or more partners had a prevalence of over 50 percent. The predominant STI was HPV.

So, what is the CDC's #1 recommendation? Abstinence. Shock. The CDC recommends abstinence.

CDC supports a comprehensive approach to STD prevention that includes the
promotion of abstinence as the surest way to prevent getting an STD, being
in a mutually monogamous relationship with a partner known to be uninfected,
and the consistent and correct use of condoms for sexually active people to
reduce the risk of acquiring many infections. Condoms (used all the time and
the right way) may lower your chances of passing HPV to a partner or
developing HPV-related diseases.

Why does the message continued to be buried? Why do the schools and Planned Parenthood insist on teaching "safe sex" and not focusing on abstinence?

• Comprehensive sex education arms young people with the knowledge to act
  safely and responsibly. The federal government must stop funding dangerous
  abstinence-only education programs.
• The spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) can be reduced through
  comprehensive, medically accurate information and responsible public health
  policies for prevention, screening, and treatment.
• The best way to prevent cervical cancer is to ensure that young women get
  vaccinated with the HPV vaccine and that all women get regular Pap tests.
• Among sexually active people, the risk of HIV/AIDS can be reduced by
  practicing safer sex and using condoms correctly every time.

The message in sex education is focused on pregnancy prevention, but how good of a job is Planned Parenthood doing if the United States continues to have the highest teen pregnancy rates of the industrial world? Could the message not be the right one? Oh, that's right, according to Planned Parenthood, it's the ultraconservative whack jobs' fault:

Sadly, ultraconservative opponents of reproductive health care continue to put
up roadblocks against sound public health policies — including access to the HPV
vaccine, use of condoms, and ensuring access to comprehensive sex education for
all young people — even though more than half of Americans will have an STI at
some point in their lives.

If sex with condoms is so "safe," how come we still have the high pregnancy and STD rates? And really, we're going to trust the schools to teach this? LAUSD can't seem to graduate more than 44% of the kids, but we're going to trust them to teach these kids how to use a condom correctly? Yeah, right.

One thing we know is clear, abstinence prevents pregnancy and STDs 100% of the time. No math test or hyperlinks needed for that fact.