If you missed last night’s report on abstinence education on 60 Minutes, you missed a stunning segment on the painfully absurd abstinence-only policy that is now commonplace across the country. The fiasco is a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with the Bush administration’s approach to public policy.
The report focused on Silver Ring Thing, an evangelical Christian program that’s received more than $1.2 million in federal and state subsidies, though the contracts are now facing a legal challenge. But in addition to just promoting abstinence, the program is also offering wildly irresponsible lessons about contraceptives, including the warning that condoms won’t protect kids from pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
“My own daughter, my 16-year-old daughter, tells me she’s going to be sexually active. I would not tell her to use a condom,” says [Silver Ring Thing founder Denny] Pattyn. “I don’t think it’ll protect her. It won’t protect her heart. It won’t protect her emotional life. And it’s not going to protect her. I don’t want her to get out there and think that she’s going to be protected using a condom.”
But wouldn’t his daughter be more protected with a condom than without? “Not long term,” says Pattyn.
This guy was arguing, on national television, that a sexually-active teenager is better off avoiding condoms altogether. And he’s getting paid millions to share this message across the country. With our money.
This isn’t an accident. The Bush administration has mandated that programs that receive public funding intentionally hide information about the health benefits of using condoms from young people and only discuss dubious information about condom failure rates.
Not surprisingly, the entire policy has everything backwards.
The largest study ever conducted on adolescent health and sexuality was conducted by Columbia University’s Peter Bearman who found that the Bush administration’s approach is putting these teenagers at enormous risk. Young people who go through these abstinence programs frequently end up having sex anyway, but a) avoid condoms because they’ve been taught to be fearful of them; and b) are even more likely to engage in high-risk sexual behavior.
“Adolescents who take virginity pledges – who remain virgins, that is, who don’t have vaginal sex, who technically remain virgins, are much more likely to have oral and anal sex,” says Bearman.
“They’re not thinking they’re having sex?” asks Bradley.
“Well, if they are trying to preserve their virginity, their technical virginity by having oral or anal sex, then obviously they’re defining these behaviors as not sex,” says Bearman.
“So they’re probably less likely to get tested for a sexually transmitted disease?” asks Bradley.
“They’re much less likely to get tested for a sexually transmitted disease. They’ve taken a public pledge to remain a virgin until marriage. The sex that they have is much more likely to be hidden,” says Bearman. “It’s likely to be hidden from their parents. It’s likely to be hidden from their peers. And if they live in a small community, it’s quite likely to be hidden from their doctor.”
Ultimately, 88% of the teenagers who go through these abstinence programs — nearly nine out of 10 — end up having sex before marriage. Indeed, there’s engaging in high-risk sexual behavior before they sex, and then they’re ignoring their “virginity pledges” anyway.
The same 60 Minutes report highlighted a classroom in Georgia where an abstinence program is used. Under the curricula, teachers aren’t allowed to tell students that when condoms are used correctly, they are nearly always effective. And if a student asks how to use a condom effectively, teachers are forbidden to tell him or her.
Meanwhile, the administration’s federal budget, which made drastic cuts to countless domestic programs, increased funding for youth programs advocating sexual abstinence.
So, to review, the Bush administration is using hundreds of millions of our dollars to finance evangelical education programs that give teenagers wrong information, silences teachers from sharing accurate information, and which fails in its social-engineering goals. Best of all, when the effort is proven ineffectual, Bush boosts the initiative’s budget.
Bush’s America is a scary place, indeed.