I don't know if I agree with that opinion. I've lived in Europe and in America, and from my personal experience, I'd say that sex is "more" everywhere in Europe than in America.

I'm not an expert on the state of sex education for children in the US, but I do know that part of our IGCSE curriculum included sex ed in seventh grade where we were taught all about what can and can not cause pregnancy, how it happens, how STD's are transmitted, a discussion on safe sex practices, etc.

I know that there is a perception amongst at least some parents in the US that arming children with such knowledge will serve only to promote wanton behaviour in their children, but again, personal experience states that the two weeks of sex ed embarassed the heck out of the class as a whole, and did not result in any increase in wanton-ness that made its way onto the school gossip networks.

Then again, our class may have been a bad sample. We were pretty much all children of diplomats and had pretty high standards of what was proper and what wasn't.

There's not a public high school that doesn't have sex ed that focuses on STD's. It doesn't change much, though. Kids still go out and do what they want to do. You can still rebel with sex...it's one of the few things that works these days.

Yes, but the difference is that while in Europe, sex education goes "Here are a bunch of nasty diseases that you can get from having sex, these are the ways in which you can avoid them, should you choose to have sex", in a lot of American schools sex ed goes "Here are a bunch of nasty diseases that you can get from having sex, condoms don't really work, control your hormones until married."

Federal funding for "abstinence only" programs has increased under Bush. The only sort of discussion of birth control/STD prevention methods that exists in these programs is to tell kids that they don't work.

So the kids go out and do what they will, only this time they've been told by their teachers that condoms don't work very well, so they may as well not use them at all.

Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled discussion!

What's up with the high infant mortality rate anyway?

At a guess, due to the impossibility of getting health care for the very poor (the standard is, wait until desperate, then go to the ER). Also, poor pre-natal education, poor nutrition and the other ills of poverty. I bet if you look at the numbers, you see hot spots of mortality inverselyt correlating to income levels. There've also been rumblings for a while that new docs are avoiding poor areas, because they don't feel they can afford to practice there any more.

Without meaning to bog the discussion down on STDs; can you walk into a family planning clinic in the US and get free condoms, or is that not availible over there?

There aren't many family planning clinics (they get branded as 'abortion clinics' even if they're not, and are thus austricised), and I've never heard of such a program, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Last I heard, Planned Parenthood gives out free condoms. They aren't everywhere, though.

In my experience, it's only practical to get free condoms while enrolled in college. The convenient student health office and even RA's rooms have lots of condoms supplied to the school by Planned Parenthood. I honestly haven't noticed free condoms at Planned Parenthood offices, where I go to get my birth control (I pay for it, but I certainly don't pay the normal retail cost), although I'm sure I could get them. But basically, only groups being specifically targeted get free condoms. The gay community, for example, used to be widely targeted with free condoms, but that's not true any more. Most people in America have to buy their condoms.

To my knowledge, there is no government health organization in the US that gives out free condoms.

Edit: Found some info.
A lot of insurance companies refused to provide coverage for birth control pills, although they provided coverage for Viagra. There wasn't much in it for the insurance companies since they figured anybody who would afford insurance could afford the pill anyway. But about 20 states have now passed laws forcing insurance companies to cover birth control.

Birth control pills are also covered by Medicaid (which also covers Viagra).

So the people who can't afford the pill are the ones who aren't poor enough to qualify for Medicaid, but aren't rich enough to be able to afford insurance.

'Course, birth control pills don't do anything about STDs. But the unintended pregnancy rate in the US is about 60% higher than it is in other developed countries.

On pain of a double post, here's an article I posted in a different thread but I felt it belonged here too.

Charity Hospitals Ripping People Off.

Apparently, these guys' idea of "charity" means "10% off the sticker price you get charged if you don't have insurance." Which ain't a lot of help to most people.

Senator Bill Frist is up to his elbows in that kind of billing silliness; he only took up politics in the first place to protect his family's chain of hospitals from Federal law.