Abstinence ed defended against Democratic report

By Tom Strode - Dec 15, 2004 - comment

The Bush administration and pro-family organizations have strongly defended sexual abstinence education in the wake of a Democratic congressional report charging many such federally funded programs teach error.

Eleven of the 13 most popular curricula in the largest federally supported abstinence initiative contain false and misleading information, according to a report conducted for Rep. Henry Waxman, D.-Calif. The 26-page study, which was released Dec. 1, says the programs “contain false, misleading or distorted information” about contraceptives, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and abortion. It also charges the curricula with confusing religion with science and portraying sexual stereotypes as facts. Abstinence education has not demonstrated it is effective in reducing teen pregnancy or the spread of STDs, according to the report.

The study’s release follows the congressional approval of a 2005 federal budget that designates about $167 million for abstinence programs through three initiatives. The abstinence allocation has more than doubled the last four years under President Bush’s leadership.

Abstinence education promoters said the Waxman report is a politically motivated attack that has its own flaws. Waxman is opposed to abstinence funding. The report was produced by the minority staff of the House of Representatives Government Reform Committee, on which Waxman is the ranking member.

“These issues have been raised before and discredited,” said Alma Golden, deputy assistant secretary for population affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services, in a written statement. “Unfortunately what they continue to do for purely political reasons is to take issues and information out of context to try and discredit abstinence education, which is a disservice to our children.”

The Heritage Foundation, which has analyzed both forms of sex education, repudiated some of the Waxman report’s findings. Melissa Pardue, a Heritage policy analyst, said the report: (1) Denies the “well-established correlation” between adolescent sex and a greater risk of attempted suicide; (2) erroneously claims pledges to remain a virgin, such as the Southern Baptist True Love Waits program, are ineffective, and (3) falsely contends there is no evidence abstinence education reduces teen pregnancy or the risk of STDs.

“There are currently 10 evaluations showing the effectiveness of abstinence education in reducing teen sexual activity,” Pardue wrote. “Of these 10 evaluations, four were published in peer-review journals.”

The Waxman report’s attacks on abstinence education “blithely ignore the fact that government funding for contraception-based sex education far outweighs the spending for abstinence education,” Pardue said. In 2002, she said, federal and state governments “spent $12 promoting contraception and condom use for every $1 [they] spent to encourage teens to abstain from sexual activity.”

Heritage’s analysis of comprehensive sex ed shows such curricula “focus almost exclusively on contraception and include very little, if any, material on abstinence,” Pardue wrote. In Heritage’s study of nine different comprehensive sex ed curricula, “not one single sentence was found urging students to abstain from sexual activity through high school,” she said.

Further Learning

Learn more about: Family, Sexual Purity, Abstinence

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