Roger Marsh: The following program is intended for mature audiences. Listener discretion is advised.
Did you know that 50% of all sexually transmitted infections occur in people ages 25 and younger and that an estimated 55% of teens have had sex by the age of 18? These are truly shocking statistics. They are very telling of our culture's distorted view of the value of intimacy and the gift of sex within a marriage covenant. I'm Roger Marsh and today on Family Talk, we're going to tackle the issue of sexual promiscuity and its consequences. Now we are not here to heap guilt on people who have already made poor decisions in the past but we are here to encourage parents to help your teens and preteens develop a healthy view of sexuality. This will help them as they navigate the questions and peer pressure of adolescence and beyond.
During his time on earth, Jesus taught that his followers should be in the world but not of the world. Sexual purity is a great example of that command in action in a Christian's life. On today's program, Dr. Dobson will be talking with Dr. Joe McIlhaney and Freda McKissic Bush about their book, Girls Uncovered. Girls Uncovered presents scientific research on the development of young girls in today's promiscuous landscape. The doctors will discuss this research as well as offer hope and encouragement to parents raising girls.
Dr. Freda McKissic Bush is a retired board-certified obstetrician gynecologist. She previously served as a medical advisor for Heartbeat International, CareNet and the Center for Pregnancy Choices, Metro Jackson. Dr. Joe McIlhaney is also a board certified OB/GYN and also an infertility specialist. In 1995, he left his private practice of 28 years to devote his full-time attention to working with the Medical Institute for Sexual Health, a nonprofit research organization that he established in 1992. Dr. McIlhaney also previously served on the presidential advisory council on HIV AIDS. Dr. Dr. Dobson, Dr. McKissic Bush and Dr. McIlhaney have lots to discuss today so let's listen in on their conversation right now on today's edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk.
Dr. James Dobson: I tell you I've been working my way through this book and there is so much information here and there is just a tremendous wave of illness and problems associated with sexual behavior. Parents really do need to understand it. Dr. Bush, I'm going to give you the first question and ask you about the book. The title is Girls Uncovered and that's kind of an odd title to put on a book. I think it explains itself a little bit in the subtitle when it says, new research on what America's sexual culture does to young women. But when you sat down to write this with Dr. McIlhaney, what was the primary theme you were trying to get across, especially to parents? This is aimed at parents, isn't it?
Dr. Freda McKissic-Bush: Yes. We wrote this book to arm and inform parents with information that they can use to help protect their young girls from the lies that our society has presented to them. One of the principal lies is that we have normalized sex for teens, as long as they protect themselves and that protection is basically defined as condoms and contraception. Forgetting that sex involves the total person. It's not just a physical act. It involves the head, the heart and the spirit of the person as well. Culture makes it appear as though there are no risk associated. That it's all recreation and it's all enjoyment, without understanding the value of it. The second thing I was going to tell you is that the girls' aspirations and dreams for themselves include completing high school, having educational aspirations, that for many includes obtaining higher degrees, doctoral degrees. They want to be married study on the future of young people have shown that most of them acknowledge that they want to marry, stay married and have children within marriage.
Dr. James Dobson: And expect to.
Dr. Freda McKissic-Bush: And expect to.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: A huge percentage of them.
Dr. Freda McKissic-Bush: A large percent of them.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: 90% of girls in high school expect to be married. Essentially all of them expect to have the same husband the rest of their lives. It's phenomenal that almost all girls want marriage.
Dr. Freda McKissic-Bush.: And yet we know that one of the ways to sabotage that is to get involved in sexual activity early, to have multiple partners. Because you're not only putting yourself at risk physically for sexually transmitted infections or for out of wedlock pregnancy but you're also becoming emotionally involved and you're injuring or damaging your ability to sustain a long-term relationship when you are ready to begin one. Sex is not just a physical act. It involves the whole person, body, mind and spirit and we are blindsided when we forget that.
Dr. James Dobson: Boy Joe, the hopes and dreams of young girls are being lost. Really the possibility of achieving what they really want, which is to be loved and be loved for a lifetime by one partner, that is undermined by what's happening in the culture today.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: Yeah. It really is. The Medical Institute's been accumulating data and information about this specific thing for a long time. And for example, as far as the desire to be married, which 90% of the girls in high school want and actually about 90% of college girls want too, the data clearly shows if they cohabit before they marry, they're more likely to divorce than when they do get married. They're undermining their whole future by the cohabitation and there are more girls at that age around 20 who are cohabiting than there are who are married. The movement in our society is in the direction that would undermine those desires that are so important to young women. That's really why we named this book, Girls Uncovered.
Dr. James Dobson: Well, describe that. What's the meaning of that title?
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: What society's always done in the past has been to protect young women's sexuality because it's so important to the tribe for example, that their young women to be able to reproduce otherwise the tribe would die out. And the same is certainly true for all of society. Western culture now is the first society that has abandoned that role of protecting the sexuality of their young women. And essentially we are leaving girls uncovered, unprotected, naked before the desires of guys, before their own inherent desires to be involved. Like Freda was talking about, we all desire to be hugged and loved and to have sex even, most of us. And yet that desire and the future good potential in our lives for that is being destroyed by the way it's been distorted by Western culture in modern society.
Dr. James Dobson: The level of immorality now compared with 20 years ago is what?
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: Compared to 20 years ago, it's dramatically changed. I'll give a couple of statistics and Freda may have some that just are still startling to me. But 70% of 18 year olds have had oral sex. 50% of college kids have had oral sex in the past 30 days. About a quarter of college kids that have been involved sexually have had six or more sexual partners. You're right, it's really sexual promiscuity. And they consider it to be a normal thing because society keeps telling them if they have the desire to be involved sexually, they're repressing themselves. They're naive, they're hurting their own psychology not to be involved in sexual activity.
Dr. James Dobson: And they're not being told about the disease and infections that come along with that. If you have six partners, like you just mentioned in the college years, you have a sexually transmitted disease, don't you?
Dr. Freda McKissic-Bush: Risk of you getting infected goes up with the number of partners and the earlier that you start having sexual behavior because that also is going to increase your partners. But the latest statistics from the Center for Disease Control states that 50% of the STIs in the United States are in 15 to 19 year olds. Now what's interesting about that is 15 to 19 year olds only make up 25% of the population. There is a lot of sexual promiscuity and a lot of it is involved with drugs and alcohol. The hooking up culture really is fueled by use of alcohol or drugs because to feel that comfortable with relating sexually with somebody that you just met, it usually takes the alcohol to decrease your inhibitions, which are normally there.
Dr. James Dobson: You gave an illustration in your book of what often happens as a prelude to the hookup event. Young man or woman is going to college. They go off to a bar someplace and they get half drunk and their inhibitions are lowered and then they go off to some private place and have sex. And they walk away as though it was nothing more than a meal together. And the next morning, they feel very differently about it.
Dr. Freda McKissic-Bush: And I know that that fuels the sexually transmitted infections also because you can't look at someone until that they have an STI. 50% of the STIs are asymptomatic, they don't know that they've got them either. Unless you get tested on a regular basis, including every time you change partners, you may have a disease, chlamydia, gonorrhea, HPV, HIV. One point I want to add back on the HPV when I mention that is the fact that because we have a lot of oral, genital and anal sex, the virus is transmitted by skin to skin so wherever it enters the body, you can have an effect. There is an increase in head and neck cancers now that are positive for HPV.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: And an increase in anal cancers.
Dr. Freda McKissic-Bush: And an increase in anal cancer.
Dr. James Dobson: And oral cancer as well.
Dr. Freda McKissic-Bush: That is correct.
Dr. James Dobson: I have read that sometimes men will develop throat cancers for behavior that took place 25 years ago.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: That's exactly right.
Dr. James Dobson: And they're in their forties now and they develop cancer and they didn't even know they carried the disease, the virus.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: That's exactly right.
Dr. Freda McKissic-Bush: Head and neck cancers used to be attributable to just smoking or excessive alcohol. But I did have a young lady in my practice that was 19 years old, that was referred to me by an infectious disease physician because she was HIV positive. She had done a free screening at her local college, had a positive HIV test. In taking her sexual history she had only had two partners in her lifetime. The first was her boyfriend in high school who was HIV positive. The second was her husband who was HIV negative and you can best believe she wondered "If only I had waited."
Dr. James Dobson: Dr. McIlhaney, one of your passions through the years is that schools and educational facilities are not warning young people of what's at stake here and not educating them about it. Implying that if they are mature enough to make this decision, it's right for them and they don't know what's at stake.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: That's right. Matter of fact, the thing that drove me out of practice to become involved full-time in this and leave my practice, which I loved by the way. My practice was primarily infertility, working with the couples who couldn't get pregnant. But when I started seeing how many of those infertile patients in my office had become infertile because of sexual involvement back in high school or college, mostly from chlamydia, it just really bothered me. And I started looking at our medical literature. We weren't having articles in our journals about prevention, even though the American Society for Reproductive Medicine said that the most common reason for a woman to be infertile was sexually transmitted to disease, we still weren't having research studies reported and done to prevent it. I just felt it was so unfair that young women not be told that their sexual involvement back in high school or college could hurt them.
And as a matter of fact, this was back in the 80s, almost all the sex ed programs were saying, "Just use condoms and you're fine. 98% prevention if you use your condoms, you're okay." We knew that wasn't true. As a matter of fact, the Texas Department of Health criticized us for saying that condoms were not that effective. And yet the data since that time has proven that we were right and that the Texas Department of Health and other health departments were wrong about what they were saying.
Dr. James Dobson: Have they admitted that?
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: No.
Dr. James Dobson: They still don't. Don't tell the truth.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: They still are not actively teaching how much condoms fail. They still are saying, "Kids are going to have sex. The best we can do for them is give them condoms." And this is part of what we're saying about the fact that our society is not giving good guidance. It's leaving our girls susceptible to the diseases. It's leaving them susceptible to the emotional impact and it's leaving them susceptible to damaged marriages later on. Because we're not really teaching them what the truth is, about healthy sexual involvement, which is in marriage and really having only one partner for life as much as possible.
Dr. James Dobson: Before we started this program, I prayed about this broadcast because I feel so strongly about it. And I worry about the parents whose kids are involved sexually and they're worried about it. The culture is taking them to Hell and they find it so difficult to do anything about it. Or at least they fear they do. This book can help. And in my prayer, I said, "Lord, frankly the challenge of this interview and I hope it will continue next time, is there's so much in here. How do we get this across to parents?" The statistics that you have in here are shocking and alarming.
You almost want to reach through these microphones and grab people by the shirts and say, "Listen to us. This is critically important, the future, the hopes and dreams of your girls and boys," but especially girls, because they pay the biggest price for immorality and for the behavior that you're talking about here. Think of a 17 or 18 or 19- or 20-year-old girl who hasn't really tasted life at all and marriage is probably in her future, at least she hopes it is and that's going to change everything. What's the percentage of girls that have a sexually transmitted infection of any kind, of all of them together? You take syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, herpes, on it goes.
Dr. Freda McKissic-Bush: Well, we do know that 50% of the STDs in the United States are in young people, 15 to 19 years of age. I'm not sure how they would extrapolate into a girl but I can tell you that one of the fastest growing HIV infected age groups is also 15 to 24 year olds. Some of the diseases don't have symptoms and you can cure them, some of them you cannot.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: About 20% of Americans have herpes infection. 10% of sexual active teens are infected with chlamydia. About 50% of sexually active people are infected with human papilloma virus. You really could say almost all young people who have had sex with more than one or two partners are infected with a sexually transmitted infection of some type.
Dr. James Dobson: It will happen to you.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: Essentially.
Dr. James Dobson: If you sleep around just a little bit, it will happen and you'll find yourself with one or more infections. Well, what this means in effect is there's not only misinformation out there but there are lies out there.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: We can talk about what the media says.
Dr. James Dobson: All right, tell me.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: And what those lies are.
Dr. James Dobson: What are the lies. What are the myths? Let's call them myths.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: Let's start off with the first one that that Freda was bringing up and that is that condoms will protect. The chairman of our board for many years was a guy named Dr. Tom Fitch, a pediatrician in San Antonio.
Dr. James Dobson: Great friend.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: He's a great friend of all of us. And matter of fact, we call him the condom king. His wife doesn't like that very much but he really is. He knows more about condoms than anybody in the world, literally. And it just drives him nuts when he sees in the media that the statement that condoms protect because they do not protect. They may reduce the risk for someone if they will use the condoms consistently and correctly, which is mostly a lab thing.
The second lie and they are lies really. And that is that all a girl has to do is use contraception and it'll keep her from getting pregnant. Even for married couples using birth control pills on a regular basis, there is about a 6% per year pregnancy rate using birth control pills. Now teens don't use them nearly as well as married women do.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: Then there's the lie that these things really won't hurt. And I think that's one of the worst lies because they hurt not only as we've talked about with sexually transmitted disease, they hurt with out of wedlock pregnancy. And one that we haven't talked about yet but I think we probably will before this is over, is how they hurt the emotions of the young person. Those are lies to say that young people can be involved sexually and doesn't hurt them. And then finally, I think that it really does hurt them spiritually and we mentioned that before, too.
Dr. James Dobson: Dr. McIlhaney, talk about the consequences of abortion. And there's another myth that is bandied about that there are no consequences to abortion, but we now know that's not true.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: Yeah. I think you're familiar with an organization called the American Association of Pro-life OB/GYNs. For about abortion, that organization is very much like the Medical Institute is about sexually transmitted disease, pregnancy and all these other things. They have the best data out there and they show that there probably is a direct relationship between abortion and breast cancer. They show that there is clearly a direct relationship between a woman who's had an abortion and a greatly increased risk of her being on drugs and alcohol and having depression. There's a very clear relationship between a woman having an abortion and ill health later on, even a shortened life. There's almost for sure direct relationship between an abortion and woman's increased risk of attempting and committing suicide.
Dr. James Dobson: And what you've just said is really evidence based medicine. You can see the statistics. They will speak for themselves. And yet women are not told that there could be very serious consequences to abortion.
Dr. Freda McKissic-Bush: And there has been a very large meta-analysis that has been published recently by Priscilla Coleman that outlines the psychological emotional effect of abortion. And it is covering all of the literature that is available in the world. And so it is evidence based that there is a significant effect emotionally and psychologically.
Dr. James Dobson: Is that information suppressed?
Dr. Freda McKissic-Bush: That information is not supported in the news media, though medically journals it is peer reviewed, published information. There's also a study that shows that there's an increased risk for premature labor and premature infants are at greater risk for infant mortality. In the African American community in particular, they talk about our high infant mortality rates but we also have a high abortion rate. It's not rocket science really to connect the two dots.
Dr. James Dobson: It turns out that God knew what he was doing and he gave guidelines for us and Commandments to us in the scripture. I'm looking at first Thessalonians 4:3 to 8. "It is God's will that you should be sanctified: that you should avoid sexual immorality; that each of you should learn to control his own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the heathen, who do not know God; and that in this matter no one should wrong his brother or take advantage of him. The Lord will punish men for such sins, as we have already told you and warned you. For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life. Therefore, he who rejects this instruction does not reject man but God, who gives you his Holy Spirit." That's pretty clear.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: It is.
Dr. James Dobson: Isn't it? That ought to be taught to every teenager.
Dr. Joe McIlhaney: That's right.
Dr. Freda McKissic-Bush: And it's also important to know that God created sex and He did it for a purpose. He made it enjoyable so that people would want to do it. They would repeat that behavior because pregnancy was expected to occur as a result of that behavior. And it would also attach or bond the two people, the mother and the father together to take care of the children that were the offsprings of that act. He made it enjoyable. He made you want to repeat it so you would get pregnant and take care of the children and the society would continue. He designed it. He commanded it but He gave you the ability to do it and to do it well.
Dr. James Dobson: And within the context of marriage.
Roger Marsh: A sobering conversation today here on Family Talk, featuring Dr. Dobson and his guests, Dr. Freda McKissic Bush and Dr. Joe McIlhaney. Their dialogue centered around Dr. McIlhaney and Dr. McKissic-Bush's book, Girls Uncovered. It was published back in 2011. You won't want to miss part two of their discussion, which will be airing tomorrow here on Family Talk.
Now, if you'd like to learn more about our guests today, their books and their work in the medical field, please visit our broadcast page at drjamesdobson.org/broadcast. That's D-R jamesdobson.org/broadcast. While you're there, you can listen to any part of today's program that you might have missed. You can also request a CD copy of this two part broadcast as well. And remember, please, don't hesitate to pick up the phone and give us a call as well. Our number is (877) 732-6825. Our team is available for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week and ready to answer any questions you might have about the JDFI or the broadcast of Family Talk. We're also here to take your prayer requests and to pray with you over the phone as well. Again, that number is (877) 732-6825.
Thanks so much for joining us for today's edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. And make sure to join us again tomorrow as Dr. Dobson will conclude his conversation with Dr. McIlhaney and Dr. McKissic Bush. Until then, I'm Roger Marsh. Hope you have a blessed rest of your day.
Announcer: This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.