Last week, while writing about HHS’s misguided attempt to help parents talk to their kids about sex (www.4parents.gov), I came across a quote from Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) that I think speaks volumes about what the abstinence-only-until-marriage vs. comprehensive sex-ed debate is really about: “A federally funded website should present the facts as they are, not as you might wish them to be.”

The facts as they are. It seems so simple. However, being faithful to this statement isn’t as easy as it sounds. For many people it becomes especially difficult to present the facts as they are — or embrace solutions – when they don’t fit into their idea of what is morally acceptable.

What do I mean by this? Take Brazil for example. Recently, that country’s commitment to the facts forced it to turn down $40 million from the United States Agency for International Development to fight AIDS. Some of the money would have been used to support organizations like Fio da Alma, a group that distributes condoms to one of the country’s most at-risk populations for contracting the AIDS virus — sex workers. Why did Brazil turn down the money? Because its efforts to stem the spread of the virus, despite their effectiveness (AIDS infections in Brazil have dropped by almost half since 1990 while skyrocketing in other developing countries), are not in line with U.S. requirements that recipient organizations must stress abstinence and condemn prostitution.

Brazil accepted the facts as they are. The government saw the potential for a pandemic. It recognized that particular populations were at an enormous risk for contracting the virus, and instead of deciding on the ultimate rightness or wrongness of prostitution, Brazil chose a solution that puts the health and lives of its citizens above a moral agenda. As the director of the Brazilian government’s AIDS program said, "If we increasingly focus the prevention of AIDS along these lines [abstinence], we are generating carnage, a slaughter. It’s not a realistic vision, and the epidemic is going to grow larger and larger."

And that brings us back to the issue of safe sex in our nation’s schools. Abstinence for teens is an essential part of sex education. I don’t refute that. But what should we do for those teens who don’t abstain from sex? (And the reality is that most teens don’t abstain.) Should we fill their sex-ed lessons with scare tactics and misinformation? Or should we put aside our ideas of what is morally acceptable and face the fact that more than our judgment these teens need information on how to protect themselves?

I say we deal with the facts as they are, and not as we wish them to be.

Imagine this: The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) decides to put together a Web site to help parents talk to their children about a number of issues, including sex. HHS needs help finding content to populate the site with reliable information about contraceptives and sexually transmitted diseases. Who should they reach out to for help?

Maybe HHS should turn to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the National Institute of Health (NIH)? Logical choices. Or maybe HHS would contact major medical societies dedicated to teen health, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics or the Society for Adolescent Medicine?

But no, instead HHS decides that the National Physicians Center for Family Resources (NPCFR) will do just fine. What is NPCFR? No, it’s not a government agency dedicated to scientific research, and no, it isn’t a well-respected major medical society. NPCFR is a nonprofit entity based in Alabama and California best known for rejecting NIH conclusions on condom effectiveness (NPCFR called the findings “medical malpractice”) and for advocating the link between abortion and breast cancer (despite major scientific studies and expert groups having reached the opposite conclusion).

And what would a site put together by HHS and NPCFR look like? Well you no longer have to imagine this scenario, because if you visit www.4Parents.gov you’ll get a nice picture of what their collaboration produced. Here you will find inaccurate information on sexually transmitted diseases and the effectiveness of contraception; discussions that misstate the relative risks of different types of sexual behaviors; and language that ostracizes single parents and the LGBTQ community.

4Parents.gov has been in the spotlight since its unveiling in March, and last week Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) sent a letter to HHS outlining problems that national experts in infectious disease, adolescent sexuality, reproductive health, and adolescent development had identified on the site.

Parents need help talking about sex with their children. It certainly isn’t an easy task. They need reliable information and guidance. However, HHS, with its 4Parents.gov site, decided that ideologically based information was more important than the health and safety of teens. Go figure.

Entering the abstinence-only battle today, Jordan Ellenberg, an assistant professor of mathematics at Princeton University, published an interesting article in Slate about the debate surrounding two recent studies on teens that take virginity pledges.

Both studies draw on the same data, however, the study by Hannah Brueckner and Peter Bearman (of Yale and Columbia respectively) and published in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that “adolescents who pledged to remain virgins until marriage had STD infection rates as young adults that were statistically indistinguishable from those of nonpledgers,” while the unpublished study by Robert Rector and Kirk Johnson of the Heritage Foundation challenged those findings as “inaccurate” and “misleading.”

Ellenberg goes into a long conversation about statistical significance and what it means and how it should (or should not) be characterized. Whether or not you want to delve into the meaning of statistical significance, p-values, and coin tosses is up to you. What I hope you will think about is the role spin plays in this debate, and what, in the end, is most important – the safety of teens or political rhetoric.