Join us for a revealing discussion on Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, where experts Dr. Joe McElhaney and Dr. Freda McKissick-Bush provide insight into the challenging sexual culture facing young women today. With a focus on the book ‘Girls Uncovered’, they uncover the physical, emotional, and spiritual risks linked to early sexual activity and multiple partners. Our hope is to equip parents with the knowledge necessary to guide their daughters through adolescence with wisdom and strength.
You’re listening to Family Talk, the radio broadcasting division of the James Dobson Family Institute. I am that James Dobson, and I’m so pleased that you’ve joined us today.
SPEAKER 01 :
Welcome to Family Talk. I’m Roger Marsh. And at the start of today’s program, I want to let you know that the following broadcast is intended for mature audiences. Listener discretion definitely advised. Now, on today’s edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, we’re addressing the issue of sexual promiscuity and its consequences. Now, we’re not here to heap guilt on anyone who’s made a poor decision in the past. Instead, we’re here to encourage parents to help your teens and preteens develop a healthy, biblical view of sexuality so that they can navigate the questions and peer pressures of adolescence with wisdom and confidence. Our guests today here on Family Talk are Dr. Joe McElhaney and the late Dr. Freda McKissick-Bush. Together, they wrote an eye-opening book called Girls Uncovered, which presents scientific research on the development of young girls in today’s promiscuous landscape. Dr. McElhaney is a board-certified OBGYN who founded the Medical Institute for Sexual Health back in 1992. And Dr. McKissick Bush was a retired board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist who dedicated her life to advocating for women’s health and sexual integrity. Sadly, Dr. Bush passed away in January of 2023, but her legacy of compassion and truth continues to impact countless lives even today. Now, during the conversation you’re about to hear with Dr. James Dobson, you’ll hear both doctors share research, hope, and encouragement for parents raising girls in today’s challenging culture. So let’s get into today’s edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk.
SPEAKER 04 :
I tell you, I’ve been working my way through this book, and there is so much information here. And there is just a tremendous wave of illness and problems associated with sexual behavior. Parents really do need to understand it. Dr. Bush, I’m going to give you the first question, and I ask you about the book. The title is Girls Uncovered, and that’s kind of an odd title to put on a book. I think it explains itself a little bit in the subtitle when it says, New Research on What America’s Sexual Culture Does to Young Women. But when you sat down to write this with Dr. McElhaney. What was the primary theme you were trying to get across, especially to parents? This is aimed at parents, isn’t it?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes. We wrote this book to arm and inform parents with information that they can use to help protect their young girls from the lies that our society has presented to them. One of the principal lies is that we have normalized sex For teens, as long as they protect themselves, and that protection is basically defined as condoms and contraception, forgetting that sex involves the total person. It’s not just a physical act. It involves the head, the heart, and the spirit of the person as well. Culture makes it appear as though there are no risks associated, that it’s all recreation and it’s all enjoyment without understanding the value of it. The second thing I was going to tell you is that the girls’ aspirations and dreams for themselves include completing high school, having educational aspirations that for many includes obtaining higher degrees, doctoral degrees. They want to be married. study on the future of young people have shown that most of them acknowledge that they want to marry, stay married, and have children within marriage. And expect to. And expect to.
SPEAKER 03 :
A huge percentage of them. A large percentage. 90% of girls in high school expect to be married. Essentially all of them expect to have the same husband the rest of their lives. It’s phenomenal. that almost all girls want marriage.
SPEAKER 02 :
And yet we know that one of the ways to sabotage that is to get involved in sexual activity early, to have multiple partners, because you’re not only putting yourself at risk physically for sexually transmitted infections or for out-of-wedlock pregnancy, but you’re also becoming emotionally involved And you’re injuring or damaging your ability to sustain a long-term relationship when you’re ready to begin one. Sex is not just a physical act. It involves the whole person, body, mind, and spirit. And we are blindsided when we forget that.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, Joe, the hopes and dreams of young girls are being lost. Really, the possibility of achieving what they really want, which is to be loved and be loved for a lifetime by one partner, that is undermined by what’s happening in the culture today.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, it really is. The Medical Institute’s been accumulating data and information about this specific thing for a long time. And, for example, as far as the desire to be married, which 90% of the girls in high school want, and actually about 90% of college girls want, too. The data clearly shows if they cohabit before they marry, they’re more likely to divorce than when they do get married. So they’re undermining their whole future by the cohabitation. And there are more girls at that age around 20 who are cohabiting than there are who are married. So the movement in our society is in a direction that would undermine those desires that are so important to young women. That’s really why we named this book Girls Uncovered.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, describe that. What’s the meaning of that title?
SPEAKER 03 :
What society has always done in the past has been to protect young women’s sexuality because it’s so important to the tribe, for example, that their young women be able to reproduce. Otherwise, the tribe would die out. And the same is certainly true for all of society. Western culture now is the first society that has abandoned that role of protecting the sexuality of their young women. And essentially, we are leaving girls uncovered, unprotected, naked before the desires of guys, before their own inherent desires to be involved. Like Freda was talking about, we all desire to be hugged and loved and to have sex, even most of us. And yet that desire and the future good potential in our lives for that is being destroyed by the way it’s been distorted by Western culture and modern society. Okay.
SPEAKER 04 :
And they’re not being told about the disease and infections that come along with that. If you have six partners, like you just mentioned, in the college years, you have a sexually transmitted disease, don’t you?
SPEAKER 02 :
The risk of you getting infected goes up with the number of partners and the earlier that you start having sexual behavior, because that also is going to increase your partners. But the latest statistics from the Center for Disease Control states that 50% of the STIs in the United States are in 15 to 19-year-olds. Now, what’s interesting about that is 15 to 19-year-olds only make up 25% of the population. So there is a lot of sexual promiscuity and a lot of it is involved with drugs and alcohol. The hooking up culture really is fueled by use of alcohol or drugs because to feel that comfortable, With relating sexually with somebody that you just met, it usually takes the alcohol to decrease your inhibitions, which are normally there.
SPEAKER 04 :
You gave an illustration in your book of what often happens as a prelude to the hookup event. Young man or woman is going to college. They go off to a bar someplace and they get half drunk and their inhibitions are lowered. And then they go off to some private place and have sex. And they walk away as though it was nothing more than a meal together.
SPEAKER 02 :
And I know that that fuels the sexually transmitted infections also because you can’t look at someone and tell that they have an STI. Fifty percent of the STIs are asymptomatic. They don’t know that they’ve got them either. So unless you get tested on a regular basis, including every time you change partners, you may have a disease, chlamydia, gonorrhea. HPV, HIV. One point I want to add back on the HPV when I mention that is the fact that because we have a lot of oral, genital, and anal sex, the virus is transmitted by skin to skin. So wherever it enters the body, you can have an effect. There is an increase in head and neck cancers now that are positive for HPV.
SPEAKER 03 :
An increase in anal cancers.
SPEAKER 04 :
And an increase in oral cancer as well.
SPEAKER 02 :
That is correct.
SPEAKER 04 :
I have read that sometimes men will develop throat cancers for behavior that took place 25 years ago. And they’re in their 40s now, and they develop cancer, and they didn’t even know they carried the disease. That’s exactly right.
SPEAKER 02 :
Head and neck cancers used to be attributable to just smoking or excessive alcohol. But I did have a young lady in my practice that was 19 years old. that was referred to me by an infectious disease physician because she was HIV positive. She had done a free screening at her local college, had a positive HIV test. In taking her sexual history, she had only had two partners in her lifetime. The first was her boyfriend in high school who was HIV positive. The second was her husband who was HIV negative. And you can best believe she wondered, if only I had waited.
SPEAKER 04 :
Dr. McElhaney, one of your passions through the years is that schools and educational facilities are not warning young people of what’s at stake here and not educating them about it, implying that if they are mature enough to make this decision, it’s right for them and they don’t know what’s at stake.
SPEAKER 03 :
That’s right. Matter of fact, the thing that drove me out of practice to become involved full time in this and leave my practice, which I loved, by the way, my practice was primarily infertility, working with couples who couldn’t get pregnant. But when I started seeing how many of those infertile patients in my office had become infertile because of sexual involvement back in high school or college, mostly from chlamydia, it just really bothered me. And I started looking at our medical literature. We weren’t having articles in our journals about prevention. Even though the American Society for Reproductive Medicine said that the most common reason for a woman to be infertile was sexually transmitted disease, we still weren’t having research studies reported and done to prevent it. I just felt it was so unfair that young women not be told that their sexual involvement back in high school or college could hurt them. And as a matter of fact, this was back in the 80s, almost all the sex ed programs were saying, just use condoms and you’re fine. 98% prevention, if you use your condoms, you’re okay. We knew that wasn’t true. As a matter of fact, the Texas Department of Health criticized us for saying that condoms were not that effective. And yet the data since that time has proven that we were right and that the Texas Department of Health and other health departments were wrong about what they were saying. Have they admitted that? No. They still don’t tell the truth. They still are not actively teaching how much condoms fail. They still are saying kids are going to have sex. The best we can do for them is give them condoms. And this is part of what we’re saying about the fact that our society is not giving good guidance. It’s leaving our girls susceptible to the diseases. It’s leaving them susceptible to the emotional impact. And it’s leaving them susceptible to damaged marriages later on because we’re not really teaching them what the truth is about healthy sexual involvement, which is in marriage and really having only one partner for life as much as possible.
SPEAKER 04 :
Before we started this program, I prayed about this broadcast because I feel so strongly about it. And I worry about the parents whose kids are involved sexually, and they’re worried about it. The culture is taking them to hell, and they find it so difficult to do anything about it, or at least they fear they do. This book can help. And in my prayer, I said, Lord, frankly, the challenge of this interview, and I hope it will continue next time, is there is so much in here. How do we get this across? I mean, the statistics that you have in here are shocking and alarming. You almost want to reach through these microphones and grab people by the shirts and say, listen to us. This is critically important, the future. the hopes and dreams of your girls and boys, but especially girls, because they pay the biggest price for immorality and for the behavior that you’re talking about here. Think of a 17 or 18 or 19 or 20-year-old girl who hasn’t really tasted life at all, and marriage is probably in her future, or at least she hopes it is, and that’s going to change everything. That’s right. What’s the percentage of girls that have a sexually transmitted infection of any kind, of all of them together? I mean, you take syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, herpes, on it goes.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, we do know that 50% of the STDs in the United States are in young people, 15 to 19 years of age. So I’m not sure how they would extrapolate into a girl. But I can tell you that one of the fastest growing HIV infected age groups is also 15 to 24 year olds. So some of the diseases don’t have symptoms and you can cure them. Some of them you cannot.
SPEAKER 03 :
About 20 percent of Americans have herpes infection. 10 percent of sexually active teens are infected with chlamydia. And about 50% of sexually active people are infected with human papillomavirus. So you really could say almost all young people who have had sex with more than one or two partners are infected with a sexually transmitted infection of some type.
SPEAKER 04 :
It will happen to you. Essentially. I mean, if you sleep around just a little bit. Yeah. It will happen, and you’ll find yourself with one or more infections. Well, what this means, in effect, is there’s not only misinformation out there, but there are lies out there.
SPEAKER 03 :
We can talk about what the media says and what those lies are. All right. Tell me.
SPEAKER 04 :
What are the lies? What are the myths?
SPEAKER 03 :
Let’s call them myths. Let’s start off with the first one that Freda was bringing up, and that is that condoms will protect. The chairman of our board for many years was a guy named Dr. Tom Fitch, a pediatrician in San Antonio. And he’s a great friend of all of us. And matter of fact, we call him the condom king. His wife doesn’t like that very much. But he really is. He knows more about condoms than anybody in the world, literally. And it just drives him nuts when he sees in the media the statement that condoms protect because they do not protect. They may reduce the risk for someone if they will use the condoms consistently and correctly, which is mostly a lab thing. The second lie is… And they are lies, really. And that is that all a girl has to do is use contraception, and it’ll keep her from getting pregnant. Even for married couples using birth control pills on a regular basis, there is about a 6% per year pregnancy rate using birth control pills. Now, teens don’t use them nearly as well as married women do. Then there’s the lie that these things really won’t hurt. And I think that’s one of the worst lies because they hurt not only, as we’ve talked about with sexually transmitted disease, they hurt without a wedlock pregnancy. And one that we haven’t talked about yet, but I think we probably will before this is over, is how they hurt the emotions of the young person. Those are lies to say that young people can be involved sexually and it doesn’t hurt them. And then finally, I think that it really does hurt them spiritually. And we mentioned that before, too.
SPEAKER 04 :
Dr. McElhaney, talk about the consequences of abortion. And there’s another myth that is bandied about that there are no consequences to abortion, but we now know that’s not true.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, I think you’re familiar with an organization called the American Association of Pro-Life OB-GYNs. About abortion, that organization is very much like the Medical Institute is about sexually transmitted disease, pregnancy, and all these other things. They have the best data out there. And they show that there probably is a direct relationship between abortion and breast cancer. They show that there is clearly a direct relationship between a woman who’s had an abortion and a greatly increased risk of her being on drugs and alcohol and having depression. There’s a very clear relationship between a woman having an abortion and ill health later on, even shortened life. There’s almost for sure a direct relationship between an abortion and a woman’s increased risk of attempting and committing suicide.
SPEAKER 04 :
And what you’ve just said is really evidence-based medicine. You can see the statistics. I mean, they will speak for themselves. And yet women are not told that there could be very serious consequences to abortions.
SPEAKER 02 :
And there has been a very large meta-analysis that has been published recently by Priscilla Coleman that outlines the psychological, emotional effect of abortion. And it is covering all of the literature that is available in the world. And so it is evidence-based that there is a significant effect emotionally and psychologically.
SPEAKER 04 :
Is that information suppressed?
SPEAKER 02 :
That information is not supported in the news media, though medically, journals, it is peer-reviewed, published information. There’s also a study that shows that there’s an increased risk for premature labor, and premature infants are at greater risk for infant mortality. So in the African-American community in particular, they talk about our high infant mortality rates, but we also have a high abortion rate. So it’s not rocket science really to connect the two dots.
SPEAKER 04 :
It turns out that God knew what he was doing, and he gave guidelines for us and commandments to us in the Scripture. I’m looking at 1 Thessalonians 4, 3 to 8. It is God’s will that you should be sanctified, that you should avoid sexual immorality, that each of you should learn to control his own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like the heathen who do not know God, and that in this matter no one should wrong his brother or take advantage of him. The Lord will punish men for such sins as we have already told you and warned you. For God did not call us to be impure but to live a holy life. Therefore, he who rejects this instruction does not reject man but God who gives you his Holy Spirit. That’s pretty clear, isn’t it? That ought to be taught to every teenager. That’s right.
SPEAKER 02 :
And it’s also important to know that God created sex. And he did it for a purpose. He made it enjoyable so that people would want to do it. They would repeat that behavior because pregnancy was expected to occur as a result of that behavior. And it would also attach or bond the two people, the mother and the father, together to take care of the children that were the offsprings of that act. So he made it enjoyable. He made you want to repeat it so you would get pregnant. and take care of the children and the society would continue. So he designed it, he commanded it, but he gave you the ability to do it and to do it well.
SPEAKER 04 :
And within the context of marriage.
SPEAKER 01 :
God’s design for intimacy is not restrictive. It’s actually protective. And when we embrace His boundaries, we discover the freedom and fulfillment He always intended. You’re listening to Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk and a sobering yet hope-filled conversation featuring Dr. Dobson and his guests, Dr. Joe McElhaney and the late Dr. Freda McKissick-Bush. Now, if you missed any portion of today’s broadcast, or if you want to share it with a parent who needs to hear this message, go to drjamesdobson.org forward slash family talk. And while you’re there, you’ll also find more information about the book called Girls Uncovered. Well, you know, there are times when we all struggle with heartaches and trials that are so severe, we really don’t understand how God could let them happen in the first place. In those situations, God seems to make no sense at all. Well, that’s why we’ve created a special 10-day email series based on Dr. James Dobson’s best-selling book, When God Doesn’t Make Sense. The series will explore the depths of hardship and examine its purpose. These insightful messages can strengthen your faith and show you how dark valleys can actually bring life’s greatest blessing, and that is a closer walk with Jesus Christ. Now, to sign up for this free resource, go to drjamesdobson.org. That’s drjamesdobson.org to sign up for the free 10-day email series based on Dr. James Dobson’s bestselling book, When God Doesn’t Make Sense. Programs like the one you’ve been listening to today exist because friends like you choose to invest in the ministry of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. Every day, we work to promote biblical principles that support marriage, family, and healthy child development. We stand for the sanctity of human life and also religious freedom and God’s design for sexuality because we know these truths transform lives and strengthen families. Your partnership with the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute makes it possible for us to reach millions each month with programs like this one rooted in scripture and grounded in compassion. So if today’s broadcast has impacted you, please consider making that stand with us. To make a secure donation online, go to drjamesdobson.org. That’s drjamesdobson.org. If you prefer to make your contribution over the phone, call 877-732-6825. Or you can always send your tax-deductible donation through the U.S. Postal Service. Our ministry mailing address is… Well, I’m Roger Marsh, and on behalf of all of us here at the JDFI, thanks so much for listening today. Be sure to tune in again next time right here for part two of our conversation featuring Dr. Dobson and his guests, Dr. Freda McKissick-Bush and Dr. Joe McElhaney, talking about the vulnerability of our girls, protecting the ones we love. That’s coming up on the next edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, the voice you can still trust for the family you love. This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.
