Abstinence-only still doesn’t work

April 14, 2007

I don’t want to alarm anyone, but telling teenagers not to have sex apparently doesn’t stop them from having sex.

A long-awaited national study has concluded that abstinence-only sex education, a cornerstone of the Bush administration’s social agenda, does not keep teenagers from having sex. Neither does it increase or decrease the likelihood that if they do have sex, they will use a condom.

Authorized by Congress in 1997, the study followed 2000 children from elementary or middle school into high school. The children lived in four communities — two urban, two rural. All of the children received the family life services available in their community, in addition, slightly more than half of them also received abstinence-only education.

By the end of the study, when the average child was just shy of 17, half of both groups had remained abstinent. The sexually active teenagers had sex the first time at about age 15. Less than a quarter of them, in both groups, reported using a condom every time they had sex. More than a third of both groups had two or more partners.

“There’s not a lot of good news here for people who pin their hopes on abstinence-only education,” said Sarah Brown, executive director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, a privately funded organization that monitors sex education programs. “This is the first study with a solid, experimental design, the first with adequate numbers and long-term follow-up, the first to measure behavior and not just intent. On every measure, the effectiveness of the programs was flat.”

The federal government currently spends $176 million a year on abstinence-only education, which only supplements the millions more spent on abstinence-only in state and local matching grants. Harry Wilson, a top official in the Department of Health and Human Services, told the WaPo yesterday “that the administration has no intention of changing funding priorities in light of the results.”

Of course not. The president has said repeatedly that the government must only fund those programs “that work,” but he didn’t mean it. Like most of his principles, Bush’s commitment to use of taxpayer dollars responsibly is malleable. In this case, it’s a choice between funding ideological nonsense or effective, comprehensive lessons on sexual health. Guess which one the White House prefers?

Scott Swenson added some helpful insights.

The news for the Bush Administration’s abstinence-only policies just seems to be getting worse, some might liken it to a swiftly sinking boat or ship.

So a burial at sea is appropriate, and by releasing the latest federal report on abstinence-only, Impacts for Title V. Section 510, Abstinence Education Programs: Final Report, from Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. late on a Friday, that is exactly what the Bushies are doing.

“After 10 years and $1.5 billion in public funds these failed abstinence-only-until-marriage programs will go down as an ideological boondoggle of historic proportions,” said James Wagoner, President of Advocates for Youth.

“The tragedy is not simply the waste of taxpayer dollars, it is the damage done to the young people who have been on the receiving end of distorted, inaccurate information about condoms and birth control. We have been promoting ignorance in the era of AIDS, and that’s not just bad public health policy, its bad ethics”.

“This report should serve as the final verdict on the failure of the abstinence-only industry in this country,” said William Smith, vice president for public policy of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS). “It shows, once again, that these programs fail miserably in actually helping young people behave more responsibly when it comes to their sexuality,” Smith continued.

In addition to what the results show, let’s also not lose sight of how the results were released — late on a Friday afternoon, posed on an administration website with no press release and no press advisory.

The administration, in other words, wants to hide the truth about sex ed from students, and then hide the truth about the administration’s failed social experiment from their parents.

The fiasco is a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with the Bush administration’s approach to public policy — ignore facts, waste money, placate extremists, and hope no one notices. It’s be hilarious if it weren’t so pathetic.

Facts are things God has put in the world to test our Faith. Faith is the One and Only Thing that can bring Salvation.

/snark

  • Let’s see. The GAO has already gone after HHS because it couldn’t find correlation between money spent on the program and actual success of the program. In fact the various programs had trouble producing any paperwork.

    Now this.

    I wonder what excuses the Admin. will come up with to hang on to this particular source of income for their pals.

  • The GOP’s “war on sex” … just as successful as its “war on drugs” and “war on pornography” and “war on terror”. The problems aren’t solved – they mostly get worse – but that doesn’t stop well placed friends of the Bush Crime Family from getting rich as Croesus off them.

    Incidentally, why must the GOP always be making war on things? Wouldn’t they be satisfied with just a program or a project or an experiment? Perhaps such terms suggest too much in the way of planning and evaluation rather than empty bravado.

  • From the report’s conclusion p83: “Program and control group youth did not differ in their rates of unprotected sex, either at first intercourse or over the last 12 months.”

    Where this differs from other reports I’ve seen is that the abstinence programs didn’t seem to do any harm. In terms of general knowledge and unprotected sex, the subjects and controls were statistically equivalent (or showed very minor differences) pretty much across the board.

    I’ll have to look more closely tonight, but at first glance, the report seems not to say that abstinence only education is a failure; rather it says that abstinence education neither adds nor subtracts to other forms of sex educations the kids got.

    I couldn’t find a good explanation of what type of education the control group got, but I did see something that led me to believe that the kids participating in the abstinence programs also got what the control kids got. So, unless I missed something — entirely possible — the study didn’t deal with “abstinence only” education.

    Anyone find anything different along these lines?

  • In a BBC report on this, they cited that “In the past few years of Republican Party control of Congress, the spending on no-sex-before-marriage education has risen from $10m to $176m a year.”

    Regarding these new findings they quoted our slack-jawed shit-for-brains president’s administration as warning against “drawing sweeping conclusions from the study”.

    I have drawn one anyway. Every single initiative our current administration has undertaken in the last six plus years has wasted either countless lives or valuable research time or precious resources or unfathomable dollars or our nation’s standing in the world. And usually each policy wastes all of these together.

    I defy any conservative to name a single legitimate initiative this asshole has put forward that has had any positive impact at all on anyone outside the neo-con base. It can’t be done. I’d better the earth’s future on it.

  • How many of these young girls who are “virgins” are giving oral sex and receiving anal sex? You can participate in both and still remain a “virgin”.

    Why do these people cringe at life?

  • The president has said repeatedly that the government must only fund those programs “that work,” but he didn’t mean it.

    Correct. What he meant was that they must fund only programs he believes work. Belief is so much more important than objectave fact in religious thinking. Religious thinkers call believing in things that have no basis in objective facts “faith,” and regard it as a sign of character; it doesn’t take a true believer to believe something that can be objectively proven with facts. Some even regard objective facts (take science) as a tool of Satan put here to test their faith.

    People like that honestly think that if they just keep their eyes shut tightly enough and hold tight to their cherished beliefs, everything will work out in the end, despite even an overwhelming body of factual evidence to the contrary. This is also why George W. Bush honestly thinks history will one day redeem him on, Iraq, taxes, his assaults on the Constitution and any other disaster of his administration you can name.

  • It doesn’t really matter to the Bushistas if programs don’t “work”; empirically determined facts are stupid things, and should be viewed with deep suspicion for their high likelihood of ideological deviation.

    A more benign (somehow) interpretation might this: for these idiots, good intentions trump outcomes every time. Of course, that’s why we’re on the road to hell.

  • Jesus’ General points out the utter futility of attempting to teach Abstinence “until Barry White is marginalized”.

  • Maybe they should just redirect funds. Provide teenage girls free Birkenstocks. Excellent form of prevention.

  • The government has overstepped its bounds on sex ed. By my quick estimation, the government has two primary interests in sex education. The first is a public health perspective in which it should act to stop the spread of sexually communicable diseases, the second being that having a bunch of kids having kids is not in the best interest of society so education about reproduction should help stem the number of pregnancy among youths with no means to raise a family.

    The Bush approach is to instead coopt the viewpoints of a religious perspective on the “morality” of sex to teach kids instead, of which the government is the poorest arbiter of those values. My question to the religious right is “where the hell are the parents?” Why does the religious right completely abdicate sex education in the home for the hope that someone else will “straighten out” their kids? Teaching abstinence only sex ed is the fruition of the nanny state I always thought the right had opposed. By dismissing education to prevent pregnancy and the spread of disease, the govenment is foresaking its primary interests in education on reproduction. Besides, raging hormones will trump morals every time. Just ask Ted Haggard.

  • Commenting on Petorado’s bright comment —

    The Right always pretends to know what to do about everything. Rightwingers define themselves as practical and decisive — not like those wishy-washy liberals who spend too much time thinking about a problem. Needless to say, if the invasion and occupation of Iraq is any example, wingers should be placed nurseries and kindergartens.

    Their solutions are either appallingly naive or draconian.

    “Just Say No to Drugs” is almost a prime example of fantasyland, but only almost. THE prime example is abstinence-only birth control, or in more direct language, “Just Say No to F*****g.”

    If simpletonian ideas don’t work, they pull out the old “Zero Tolerance” solution. “Zero Tolerance” means “We don’t have any principles or judgment, so we’ll just make whatever it is a crime.” This leads to the popular “mandatory sentence,” which has clogged jails and courts since the Reagan administration made them a resolute-sounding cop-out.

    With much more emphasis on order than law, the hardnose Right has cost this country billions of dollars and created more criminals than we can count. They’ve taken kids and young adults who need treatment, hope, education, or just a good rap on the knuckles, and thrust them into the vortex of a “justice system” that teaches criminal engineering.

    So far, few teens have gone to jail for not abstaining from sex, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the next suggestion.

    Education, as Petorado cites, is the only workable solution — and it’s the only real solution to much else that ails us.

  • I read somewhere recently that one third of all US money for AIDS prevention in Africa HAS to go to abstinence programs. Congress is trying to undo that , or at least some of them are. Anyways, a THIRD of the money is essentially tossed into the wind, or into someone’s pockets.

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