With friends like these
The governor's abstinence campaign is launched with the help of people who have advocated and even performed abortions
From Kentucky Citizen Digest, Jan, 1998

If you want to have a conference designed to launch an abstinence campaign, it’s a good idea to bring in people who believe in the abstinence message. At a recent state summit on teen pregnancy prevention billed as the kick-off for the state’s abstinence campaign, some of the speakers had ties to prominent abortion advocacy organizations that have fought abstinence efforts in the past.

The keynote speaker at the conference, Henry Foster, not only has strong ties to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading abortion advocacy group, but has actually performed as many as 700 abortions himself.

Many Kentuckians will remember that Foster was President Clinton’s choice for U.S. Surgeon General to replace Joycelyn Elders in 1995. Foster’s nomination was defeated by the U.S. Senate because of his conflicting accounts in regard to how many abortions he had actually performed. He at first told Sen. Nancy Kassebaum that he had only performed one, but was discovered to have previously stated that he performed as many as 700.

His involvement in various other health controversies helped to bury the nomination. President Clinton then appointed him to be the president’s adviser on teen pregnancy.

Another speaker at the conference was Tina Hester. Hester has been the director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Rights Project, an abortion advocacy effort that supports taxpayer funding of abortions.

Although the conference was scheduled before it was known that Kentucky would be receiving a federal grant to promote abstinence, the television commercials unveiled at the conference are to be paid for in large part by the federal government.

The media campaign, called “Get a Life First: Wait to Have Sex,” features teenagers telling other teens to postpone sexual involvement. The idea of marriage, however, seems to find little place in the state’s commercials. “We certainly don’t have a problem with telling kids to wait to have sex,” said Martin Cothran, public policy analyst with The Family Foundation of Kentucky, “but rather than telling kids, ‘Get a Life First,’ we should be telling them, ‘Get a Marriage First’.”

The Family Foundation was not the only organization raising concerns over the approach the state is set to take on the issue of abstinence. According to Jane Chiles, spokesperson for the Catholic Conference of Kentucky, instructing children on the use of contraceptives while at the same time trying to promote abstinence is a mistake. “It sends them a mixed message,” Chiles told the Lexington Herald-Leader. The Catholic Conference represents Catholic churches across the state.

Dr. Foster promoted his own so-called “abstinence” program during the conference. The program, called “Look to the Future,” includes discussions about contraceptives. “This is not an abstinence-only approach,” says Cothran. “This is an ‘abstinence, but ...’ approach. We need to be telling kids to ‘just say no,’ not ‘just say maybe’.”

Foster openly criticized those who believe in an abstinence-only approach. “They have the mistaken notion that knowledge about sex will be a trigger to sex,” he said, “Sex drive is a biological instinct.”

In a program that is supposed to promote abstinence, the least Kentuckians ought to be able to expect is that the people running it believe in the message.
 

Key Family Foundation Contacts: Kent Ostrander, Executive Director Martin Cothran, Senior Associate Policy Analyst