There does not appear to be a MeSH heading for "Abstinence Education." I’m not sure how I feel about this, seeing as how I seriously disagree with the need to catalog anything with that subject heading. But on the other hand, I do have to catalog something like that, so I’m conflicted.
This is a GAO booklet, with the main entry of 245 0 0 $a Abstinence education: $b efforts to assess the accuracy and effectiveness of federally funded programs. It’s a government sanctioned document–and it’s public knowledge that this administration is all for abstinence education in public schools–so why not add a MeSH term for it? Hmmm. Maybe the NLM didn’t get the memo.
At any rate, the search term "abstinence" gave me things like "Natural Family Planning Methods–>Periodic Abstinence" and "Sexual Abstinence–>Postpartum Abstinence", but that’s about it. Not a lot to work with there. At the other end of the spectrum, the search term "sex" produced about a million responses, roughly half of which are biomedical terms for genes and proteins. So I guess I’m combining "Natural Family Planning Methods" with "Sex Education" and hoping for the best. The things we catalogers go through for the geeral public . . . my stars.
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