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The sex education debate has its own language, words that seem chosen for their blandness: “Comprehensive” and “abstinence-plus” sex education programs promote appropriate condom use, teach sexual communication skills and encourage abstinence, although not to the satisfaction of abstinence advocates. They favor “abstinence-only” curricula, which focus exclusively on maintaining virginity until marriage.
Sex education, long a hot potato on the plate of public education, has bounced among school boards and PTA meetings and teachers’ lounges. For years individual schools did their own thing, usually without much oversight.
Things began to change in 1982, when Congress passed the Adolescent Life Family Act, which provided small grants to education programs promoting abstinence. In 1996 an obscure provision in Bill Clinton’s national welfare-reform legislation earmarked certain state education funds for abstinence-only education.
But the serious money didn’t start flowing until 2001, and state and federal spending on abstinence-only education has surpassed the $1.5 billion mark. To get money, school programs may not discuss contraceptives except to emphasize failure rates.
Some of the nation’s most popular abstinence-only lesson plans come from Glenview, Ill.-based Project Reality. Founded in 1985 by Kathleen Sullivan, who was alarmed by sex education in her children’s school, Project Reality sells “character based” abstinence-only education materials to elementary, middle and high schools in 23 states.
Recent legislation ensures the continuation of federal funds for abstinence-only education, at least through the end of 2008. Beyond that, no one’s taking anything for granted. In the last year a few high-profile reports have hammered at abstinence education, questioning the programs’ results and putting the advocacy community, including groups like Project Reality, on the defensive.
Most recently researchers at the University of Washington found that students who attend comprehensive sex education classes are half as likely to get pregnant as their peers in abstinence-only education classes or those who don’t receive any sex education.
The study, which appears in the April 2008 issue of the Journal of Adolescent Medicine, is the first to compare national teen pregnancy rates and sex education methods, but only the latest to discredit claims that abstinence education delays sex or prevents pregnancy.
One report, from the nonpartisan National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, went further, stating that abstinence programs pass along medically inaccurate information about the efficacy of condoms and ways of contracting sexually transmitted diseases.
The group agrees with 90 percent of U.S. parents and teenagers who, according to polls, favor a curriculum that encourages abstinence but includes practical information about contraception.
Abstinence-only proponents insist their programs are working. And certainly the abstinence message is making an impact: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 1991 and 2005 there was a 14 percent drop in the number of teenagers who reported having sex. (It’s not clear whether the successful abstinence messages are delivered at school, at home or in a religious setting.)
More nebulously, teen pregnancy and birthrates also dropped during that period, a shift that may be attributable to increased abstinence-only education or improved use of contraception, depending on your point of view.
This type of statistic, so easily manipulated to fit any agenda, is the bane of social scientists. Unfortunately for them, and anyone else looking for concrete answers, the sex-ed files are filled with malleable numbers.
Case in point: In 2007, the teen pregnancy rate rose for the first time since 1991. Why? Tony Perkins, president of the pro-abstinence Family Research Council, pinned the jump on the “utter failure … of contraceptive-focused sex education,” while comprehensive sex-ed boosters blamed a lack of information about contraceptive use.
No one knows better than politicians just how treacherous the subject of sex education can be. Factor in the inevitable laundry list of companion issues — AIDS, condom distribution, abortion, parental notification — and you’re in no-win territory, aka political hell.
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