The federal government has set aside a budget of $50 million in grants for the upcoming year for states to teach sexual education to adolescents and/or adults. In order to receive the grant money, the federal government is urging states to teach abstinence-only programs. Besides being an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars, abstinence-only sex education is a foolish, deluded and downright dangerous approach to teaching sexual responsibility to young people. An article published in the January issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health and authored by professors at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health found “no scientific evidence that abstinence-only programs demonstrate efficacy in delaying initiation of sexual intercourse.” Furthermore, in 2004 the minority staff of the Committee on Governmental Reform of the U.S. House of Representatives found that 11 of the 13 most commonly used curricula in abstinence education programs found wrong or misleading information. Some of the more colorful examples include:
– Condoms fail to prevent HIV approximately 31 percent of the time. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that condoms form an “essentially impermeable barrier to particles the size of STD pathogens.”
– Studies show women are more prone to suicide after an abortion. This assertion flies in the face of the American Psychiatric Association, which found that an abortion has no independent effect on women’s psychological well-being over time.
– Another curriculum found that tears and sweat could transmit HIV. According to the CDC, “contact with saliva, tears, or sweat has never been shown to result in transmission of HIV.” It’s clear that abstinence-only education not only doesn’t work-it’s fraught with errors that endanger its pupils more than help them. Teenagers are going to have sex. Young adults are going to have sex. And the fact that the government is trying to change the choices made by consenting adults who violate no laws is insulting to their decision-making capabilities. Skirting any real, scientific discussion on education and safe-sex with an abstinence-only program will do nothing but let the problems created by unsafe practices fester in our society. Wouldn’t it be great if all young people abstained until marriage and avoided STDs and unwanted pregnancies? Of course. That is clearly not going to happen. It’s just a dream. At least the dream isn’t costing us $50 million.
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