Sex has a price: Sunday night speaker delivers straight talk on serious conquences

Monday, September 20, 2010
Pam Stenzel takes the stage at Memorial Auditorium Sunday evening where she held an audience of teenagers spellbound as she outlined the high cost of premarital sex. (Dawn Cribbs/McCook Daily Gazette)

McCOOK, Nebraska -- No matter what other excuse they may offer, several hundred teenagers from Southwest Nebraska and Northwest Kansas will no longer be able to say, "Nobody told me," after Sunday night's "Sex Still Has a Price Tag" presentation at Memorial Auditorium by author and speaker Pam Stenzel.

The auditorium fairly hummed with conversation, playful rough-housing and dozens of teens texting on their cell phones immediately before Stenzel took the stage. She held the audience spellbound for the next hour and a half, alternately chiding and encouraging them to make good choices, offering hard data they could use in making those choices.

Stenzel counseled at a crisis pregnancy center for nine years and shared several anecdotes from that experience and her experience over the past several years addressing teens across the nation and the world.

"A girl would come in, petrified that she was pregnant," Stenzel related. "When I told her the pregnancy test was negative, you could see her relief. She wasn't the least bit prepared for what came next."

Pregnancy isn't a disease, Stenzel said, it is a condition, a survivable, albeit life-changing condition. And although it isn't the only consequence of premarital sex, teen pregnancy is a serious issue nationwide, with $30 billion spent annually to support single-parent households, primarily made up of teen mothers.

Single-parenting is the No. 1 indicator of poverty in America, Stenzel said, even as she explained changes in the law of the land concerning fatherhood.

"The social security numbers of both the mother and the father are now required on birth certificates," she said -- not to help the young father keep track of birthdays or other milestones, but to collect the money necessary to support and raise the child.

"That's somewhere in the neighborhood of $60-$80,000 over 18 years," she said. Leaving the father's name blank is no longer an option. "Someone fathered the child. And the state will find out who that someone is, and hold them accountable."

Pregnancy isn't the only problem associated with premarital sex, Stenzel said, although it does leave you with a limited number of choices, ranging from bad to horrible to worse than horrible. Unapologetically pro-life from birth, her own conception the result of rape, she offered that the hardest -- but possibly the best of the three options -- is adoption.

Moving on to the other price tags due and payable because of premarital sex, she issued a tongue-in-cheek challenge to her audience, daring them to go home and ask their grandparents about sexually transmitted disease in their day.

As the audience chuckled at the thought, she identified the five STDs known and treated in the 1950s, and said that today there are more than 30 STDs, including chlamydia, genital herpes, genital warts, gonorrhea, syphilis and HIV/AIDS. Thirty percent of those are incurable. "Once you've got it, you've got it for life," she said.

Each of these diseases carries a steep price with untreated chlamydia often progressing into pelvic inflammatory disease, causing infertility.

"So, here is the young woman, in her mid-twenties now, finished with college, married and ready to start a family, only to be told that she is unable to conceive, to carry, to have a child of her own."

Then there's herpes, she said. "Can't you just imagine the conversation?" A young man, in love and ready to marry, down on one knee, proposing marriage. "Oh, and by the way, here's what else I bring to the marriage," she said, referring to the television commercials touting the medication used to treat outbreaks.

"It's a viral infection," she said. "It never goes away."

The danger of genital warts is serious, she said, with the potential to cause cervical and uterine cancers. Stenzel spoke about an 18-year-old girl who was first treated for cervical cancer when she was 15. In spite of several cryo-surgeries to freeze the surface of the cervix and remove the cancer, she was scheduled for a radical hysterectomy later that week as the aggressive cancer had continued to spread.

The situation with STDs is so dire, Stenzel said, that comprehensive sex education has taken the position that "Everyone gets an STD, like chickenpox, it's unavoidable."

That's what they'd like you to think, "boys will be boys" and there's nothing we can do to change it. Stenzel emphatically criticized that opinion. "We aren't uncontrollable animals. We have the ability to choose. And there's one easy rule.

"Keep your pants on!"

"You cannot safely sin," Stenzel warned. "Sex involves more than your physical body, it affects your heart, it affects your soul. That's why Paul warned the Corinthians in I Corinthians 6:18 to 'Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body.'

"The Bible says, 'As you sow, so shall you reap.'" Stenzel said.

Stenzel was unabashed in her praise for the gift of sexual intimacy, within the proper boundaries. And that boundary is not love, she said, that boundary is not popularity, that boundary is not experimentation. That boundary is marriage.

"God created sex. He also gave us the right to choose.

"We can choose to follow our own way, shaking our fist at God, but if you do so, now you know‚ there is a high cost for doing so."

Stenzel's presentation was sponsored by the A Baby Conceived Pregnancy Center, the Red Willow County Ministerial Association and generous donations from other businesses and individuals.

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  • Sex is free, Paying for it is illegal. HA

    -- Posted by youngneighbor on Mon, Sep 20, 2010, at 3:49 PM
  • Words of the wise to the unwise, youngneighbor, "Buddy, can you spare a buck".

    -- Posted by Hugh Jassle on Mon, Sep 20, 2010, at 8:30 PM
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