Right-wingers (Drudge yesterday, Rush today) have been paying attention to this story:

CANTON, Ohio -- There are 490 female students at Timken High School, and 65 are pregnant, according to a recent report in the Canton Repository....

School officials are not sure what has contributed to so many pregnancies....

By the way, that's about 13% of the girls in the school. (The original Canton Repository story is here.)

I can't explain what's going on in Canton. But apparently this little lecture series somehow failed to stem the pregnancy tide:

Sunday, December 5, 2004

CANTON -- If you get a sexually transmitted disease three times, you can’t get pregnant. Birth control can cause infertility. And condoms can’t prevent disease.

These inaccurate statements are the kind that Planned Parenthood of Stark County is trying to correct, the agency’s officials said at a press conference for student journalists this week. The agency held the press conference after some high school students raised concerns about a pro-abstinence speaker who ad-dressed area schools last month.

Pam Stenzel, a Minneapolis psychologist and abstinence advocate, spoke at nearly every public high school in Stark County about character and waiting to engage in sex until marriage....

Lisa Martin, a Planned Parenthood community education specialist, said she was alarmed when students, after hearing Stenzel’s speech, asked questions about statements they claimed Stenzel said. Some of those alleged comments include: A condom cannot protect from disease, tests for sexually transmitted diseases are prohibitively expensive and birth control can cause infertility, Martin said....

According to reports Planned Parenthood received, Stenzel told students during her speeches that birth control makes women more susceptible to STDs. Stenzel didn’t cite a specific source for this information, which Planned Parenthood says is inaccurate....

Canton's sex education is "abstinence plus," according to this local source -- it's not one of the abstinence-only programs in Ohio that were recently criticized for wild inaccuracies. But I guess the abstinence advocates use whatever opportunities they can get to unleash their patented blend of truth, half-truth, and utter bullshit. And that's the kind of sex education our kids need, right -- thoroughly confusing and only partly accurate?