Proponents of sex education programs that focus on encouraging abstinence are launching a nationwide campaign aimed at enlisting 1 million parents to support the controversial approach.
The National Abstinence Education Association, a Washington-based advocacy group, said that it sent e-mails last week to about 30,000 supporters, practitioners and parents to try to recruit participants and plans to e-mail 100,000 this week as part of the first phase of the $1 million campaign.
The e-mail is promoting the Parents for Truth campaign, which the group hopes will eventually involve 1 million parents nationwide to lobby local schools to adopt sex education programs focusing on abstinence and to work to elect local, state and national officials who support the approach.
“There are powerful special interest groups who can far outspend what parents can in terms of promoting their agenda. But we recognize that parents more than make up for that by their determination and motivation to protect their own children,” said Valerie Huber, the group’s executive director.
A controversial approach… ??
Yeah, “ineffective” would have been a better word than “controversial”.
Tegularius,
“Ineffective!?” With the exception of Mary, abstinence has worked every time it has been tried.
Abstinence may work, but abstinence-only sex education programs do not. The adjectives “controversial” (in the original) and “ineffective” (my modification) referred to the programs, not to the general concept of abstinence.
Tegularius stated: “..but abstinence-only sex educations programs do not (work).”
If you define the program as failing because some of those who took it got pregnant anyway, then all sex education has failed. What the article lacks is a comparison between abstinence-only and other sex education in a control environment – and certainly from a study that isn’t sponsored by the Catholic Church or the makers of Trojans.
The most thorough study I could easily find is from 2007 and was sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services; it is available at [url=http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/abstinence07/index.htm]this link[/url].
From the summary in the “Conclusions” section:
The main objective of Title V, Section 510 abstinence education programs is to teach abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage. The impact results from the four selected programs show no impacts on rates of sexual abstinence. About half of all study youth had remained abstinent at the time of the final follow-up survey, and program and control group youth had similar rates of sexual abstinence. Moreover, the average age at first sexual intercourse and the number of sexual partners were almost identical for program and control youth.
So “ineffective” seems to be a pretty good single-word summary.
(Apologies–failed attempt to close the blockquote. The last sentence is mine, not from the report.)
Tegularius
But what was the rate of other sex education? If it is no better than abstinence only, then why do it?
In the state of Texas as abstinence only teaching as increased sop has the rate of teen pregnancy. The reason real sex ed is better than abstinence only is this: while both seem to have about the same rate of sexual activity, abstinence only education seems to lead to a lower incidence of contraception and a greater incidence of teen pregnancy.