Scary

By now, I'm sure that most of you have heard about the results of a recent study that states 1 in 4 teenage girls has an STD. If not, you can read about it here. How crazy is this?!?

Even worse is that only half of the girls in the study claimed to have had sex, and of those 40% had an STD. If we do the math, that means that 10% of the girls claiming to have never had sex had an STD!! Someone needs to teach these girls that Bill Clinton's definition of "sex" is not correct. Oral sex is sex, too.

As a parent of girls, this scares the crap out of me. We teach abstinence in our house, and our girls have a very strong religious influence. I am hoping that they will follow our advise and the teachings of the church. However, I don't want to leave them completely uneducated about pregnancy and STD prevention should they choose not to.

How to go about giving them the information about birth control and STD prevention is very tricky, though. What do you say to them? "Honey, we want you to abstain from sex, but if you don't want to listen to us, here's what you need to do?" That feels too much like giving your child rules, but telling them that it's okay if they break them.

The only thing I know for sure right now is that my girls (at least the two oldest ones) will definitely be getting their HPV vaccines this summer. HPV was the number one STD among those girls in the study.