Just when it seemed like the Bush administration’s support for abstinence-only “education” couldn’t look any worse, we learn of yet another embarrassment.
A couple of months ago, reports surfaced that federally-funded abstinence programs offer wildly incorrect information to students, while advancing a neo-puritan approach to gender roles. Making matters worse, we learned this week that abstinence programs in Bush’s Texas seem to increase sexual activity among students.
Abstinence-only programs like those promoted by the Bush administration don’t seem to be working on teenagers in the president’s home state, according to a state-sponsored study by Texas A&M University researchers.
The ongoing study, the first evaluation of the abstinence programs across the state, found that students in almost all high school grades were more sexually active after undergoing abstinence education.
Your tax dollars at work.
Granted, the Texas A&M research data is not without flaw. The study lacks a comparison group, so researchers can’t say whether the teenagers would have shown an even greater increase in sexual activity had they not had abstinence education. Nevertheless, the results researchers found among teens in 29 Texas high schools casts even more doubt over why on earth we’re investing so much money into curricula that include wrong information and doesn’t produce the desired results.
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, the percentage of boys who had ever had sexual intercourse jumped from 24 percent to 39 percent after participating in an abstinence program.
Naturally, the Bush administration is not only unprepared to scale back on these ineffective, erroneous lessons, it actually plans to invest more tax dollars into abstinence-only “education.”
As for Texas, maybe young people could make more informed decisions if they had, you know, real information.
Of the four state high school health textbooks under consideration in Texas this summer, one says teenagers should “get plenty of rest” if they want to avoid sexually transmitted diseases. It also suggests students can help prevent pregnancies by respecting themselves. The book avoids any discussion of condoms.
Update: Carpetbagger regular PWalker writes in to note that Bush’s State of the Union argued, “Taxpayer dollars must be spent wisely, or not at all.” With this in mind, we can expect the White House to stop giving millions of dollars to these abstinence programs, right?