Rumors of abstinence’s death are greatly exaggerated
The Obama administration’s recent decision to redirect the bulk of sex-education funding to evidence-based approaches was greeted with misleading and outraged responses on the right. A few examples:
Lifesitenews reported that “the president recommends that Congress eliminate funding for abstinence education and instead pour funds into condoms and contraceptive-based sex education.” (On Catholic.org, this story ran under the headline “Obama Calls for Condom Funding to Replace Abstinence Education.”)
Family Research Council claimed that “Washington is preparing to send a message to America’s teens that sexual restraint is also unnecessary” and “no less than $75 million would go to teen pregnancy prevention programs that include contraception promotion–not abstinence education.”
At Lifenews.com, National Abstinence Education Association President Valerie Huber characterized the move as an “overreaching decision to zero out abstinence education funding.”
Whether intentional or not, this sort of rhetoric obscures the distinction between sexual education that emphasizes abstinence and abstinence-only education. Joshua Dubois described the funding formula as follows:
75 percent of funding in a new teenage pregnancy prevention program will be directed to programs that have demonstrated by rigorous research to prevent teen pregnancy. The rest of the funds will be directed to promising, but not yet proven, programs for which we have some indication that they achieve the goal of teen pregnancy prevention. Those programs would have to agree to participate in a rigorous evaluation, and abstinence-only programs could qualify.”
As we’ve pointed out before, programs with demonstrated effectiveness do in fact emphasize abstinence…just not exclusively so. A report issued earlier this year by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found that
Most of the programs with the strongest evidence of success are those that encouraged abstinence as the safest choice for teens and also encouraged those who do have sex to use contraception.
Such findings indicate that the new policy’s emphasis on effectiveness will not drive abstinence out of the classroom, but rather will direct funding to programs that promote abstinence while also teaching teens other ways to prevent pregnancy and transmission of STI’s.