The Loretto High School gymnasium bleachers rocked as every one of its 467 students gave a standing ovation to a speaker who had just delivered a knockout message with the power of a heavyweight champion.

The speaker was Pam Stenzel, who makes it her business to travel worldwide challenging teens to choose “the abstinence advantage.”

“If you forget everything else, there is one thing you need to remember,” boomed Stenzel to her audience. “If you have sex outside of marriage, outside of one permanent monogamous partner, you’ll pay.”

Stenzel was in the Sacramento area April 9-10 speaking to students at Loretto, St. Francis, Jesuit and Christian Brothers High Schools. A Minnesota mother of three, Stenzel began her talks to Minneapolis youth in 1989 after serving as director of the Alpha Women’s Center, a crisis pregnancy center.

“It took nine years of girls looking at me and saying ‘Nobody told me, I didn’t know or I’d have made a different choice,’” said Stenzel, who believes teens do make the right choice when given the facts.

Today she speaks to more than 500,000 young people annually, including Catholic school students in the Archdioceses of Milwaukee, Denver, Los Angeles, Baltimore, St. Louis and New Orleans.

Stenzel tells teens that when it comes to issues related to sex, they are facing consequences youths in previous generations couldn’t begin to imagine.

“We were wrong in the ‘60s when we said would could do whatever we wanted, that God’s rules were not for us and we found out we were wrong,” she said.

Teens in 2001, she cautioned, are living at a time when sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are running rampant, sterility, infertility and abortion rates are up and marriages are falling apart.

“The worst thing that can happen (if you have sex) is not pregnancy,” Stenzel told students, noting that during a 24-hour period 12,000 people are infected with STDs. “There is a four times greater risk of contracting a disease than becoming pregnant.”

Statements like these caught the attention of students like Loretto freshman Andrea Dixon.

“(Stenzel) wants you to make your own decisions and tells you what will happen when you do,” she said. “I really liked how she laid it out and backed it with actual facts.”

Stenzel talked about God’s role guiding youth in making life and death choices associated with issues of sexuality.

“God loves us and his love is not about wrecking your fun or ruining your weekend,” she noted. “God lets you choose and with that there is a colossal risk.”

The risks, warned Stenzel, come not only in the form of contracting one of 30 STDs, many of which are incurable, but in joining the 80 percent of teenage moms living in poverty.

“The number one indicator of poverty in this country is single parent households,” she said. “If we took care of teen pregnancy, we would not have poverty.”

Making good choices, Stenzel tells teens, often takes a lot of courage, maturity and love. She shared a story about a 15-year-old girl who became pregnant after she was raped and had a decision to make.

“The girl chose to give her child life and place that child with an adoptive parent and that child was me,” she said. “God is capable of taking your worst pain…and making something beautiful. Its called amazing grace.”

Healthy, pre-marital relationships, explained Stenzel, must be built within a framework of mutual respect.

“I believe women own the keys to this,” she said. “If you want respect, you have to demand it.”

In her travels crisscrossing the country talking to teenagers, Stenzel has observed a growing number of young people who are choosing not to have sex before marriage.

“Today we have a group of kids who are not having sex and are militant about it…and I’m saying ‘Good for you,’” she said.

For more information, contact Pam Stenzel by visiting the Web site at www.pamstenzel.com.

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