Abstinence Programs: An Exercise in Futility?
By Byron LaMasters
The first evaluation of abstinence-only programs used by the state of Texas shows that high school students have become more sexually active after abstinence-only edication became federal policy. The Dallas Morning News reports (emphasis mine):
Abstinence-only programs – the hallmark of the Bush administration's federal sex education policy – seem to have little impact on the behavior of Texas teenagers.
The first evaluation of programs used throughout the state has found that students in almost all high school grades were more sexually active after abstinence education. Researchers don't believe the programs encouraged teenagers to have sex, only that the abstinence messages did not interfere with the usual trends among adolescents growing up.
"We didn't find what many would like for us to find," said researcher Buzz Pruitt of Texas A&M University. [...]
Among the findings in the Texas study: About 23 percent of the ninth-grade girls in the study already had sexual intercourse before they received any abstinence education, a figure below the national average. After taking an abstinence course, the number among those same girls rose to 28 percent, a level closer to that of their peers across the state.
Among ninth-grade boys, the percentage who reported sexual intercourse before and after abstinence education remained relatively unchanged. In 10th grade, however, the percentage of boys who had ever had sexual intercourse jumped from 24 percent to 39 percent after participating in an abstinence program. [...]
Texas has now joined about a dozen other states that have evaluated their abstinence education programs. "By and large they got no changes in behavior," said Debra Hauser, vice president of the non-profit group Advocates for Youth, which has conducted studies that support more comprehensive sex education programs that include contraception.
How many studies will it take for people to realize that abstinence-only programs don't work? Sure, some kids will listen to such programs, but those students are those that are most likely to abstain from sex anyways. To many teens, you might as well tell them to jump off a cliff. Among these teens, how can you prevent unwanted pregnancies and STD's if you don't tell them how to prevent them? Well.... you can't.
Posted by Byron LaMasters at January 31, 2005 12:25 AM
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It's just another example of how ideology conflicts with reality for conservatives and the GOP. Something that sounds like a good idea on paper (abstinence, spreading democracy) runs into a concrete wall when put into practice, but they keep trying anyway.
The same thing with cutting taxes (though I'm not trying to equate them morally). They spent the early part of Reagan's first term making huge tax cuts, then they had to raise taxes through his second, and Bush I's term, and Clinton's first term before we got passed huge deficits. What's the first thing they did when junior came to office?
In the end, it doesn't actually matter to them if something works or not. They will keep doing it because social conservatives don't want kids to have sex ed in school and aren't going to do it themselves, but they'll vote for the GOP everytime to teach abstinence only and keep gay marriage off the books. It will keep not working and they'll keep trying anyway.
