Georgia Community Educator Takes Abstinence Message to Teens
by Jim Brown and Jenni Parker
May 26, 2004
(AgapePress) - For the past six years, a labor and delivery nurse at a large hospital in Georgia has been bringing her abstinence education program to local public schools.Phillippia Faust is the community educator for Rockdale Medical Center in Conyers, Georgia. Since 1998 she has been offering prenatal care, childbirth education, and abstinence advice to pregnant teenagers. In the past few years she has done abstinence education in Rockdale County schools and East Metro physician offices, and has also taught "Pregnant and Prepared," Rockdale Medical Center's teen pregnancy education class.
And now, thanks to a federal grant of more than half a million dollars over three years, Faust is continuing to address this important topic with teens through the "Adolescent Health Education and Peer Leadership Project." Through this funding, the program is being implemented in three area middle schools, three high schools, two doctor's offices, and a foster home for teenage girls in Rockdale.
As part of the 13-week program, teens are presented with detailed information about the harmful consequences of sexual activity outside of marriage. "We do abstinence education holistically," Faust says, "talking about the effects of premarital sexual activity on your intellect, in your spirituality, in your body -- because that's what most people focus on -- as well as emotionally, and socially."
In the past six years, more than 200 students have gone through this all-encompassing abstinence education program. One of its primary objectives, Faust says, is to teach young people how to weigh the consequences of the choices they make.
"We are always telling them that contained within their choice is everything connected with that decision," the dedicated community educator says, "so everything that you would perceive as the good, and so many things -- the consequences that we don't readily see -- are contained within the choice. And you've got to walk out all of it in your life."
While teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are commonly discussed in her program, the Georgia nurse says abstinence education is all about strengthening the family. "Abstinence upholds the family as the basic unit of society and recognizes marriage as the framework for the family, which equates childbearing within the context of family," she says.
Faust recently produced an abstinence-themed event for young people called "A Covenant of Choice." The program featured mock weddings and other exercises designed to help young people learn to make wise decisions and to help them understand that the proper framework for sexual expression is a loving and committed marriage.
