The process of writing obituaries for the fundamentalist brain child that has plagued the nation for the past 8 years, known as "abstinence-only education," has already begun.  Studies have repeatedly shown that abstinence-only fails at its purported public health claims (though I suppose it succeeds amply at its unspoken aim of making anti-choicers feel like their religious views are the official state views). Just as importantly, abstinence-only has become a national joke.  How could it not?  A bunch of dour scolds telling teenagers to wait 10 or 15 years to have sex when they're married makes as much sense in an era when 95% of Americans have had premarital sex as square dancing lessons.  In a nation with the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the developed world, the people have come around to believing we need something more than shaking a finger in the face of eye-rolling teenagers.   

But what happens next? 

According to Newsweek, the writing's on the wall for abstinence-only, no matter who wins the election.  Both candidates have endorsed the idea of contraception education in schools to various degrees, but even if they hadn't, the fact that the states are refusing federal abstinence-only funds means the program might just die from lack of use.  Are we looking at an inevitably brighter future in sex education?  Activists who do this work day to day vehemently caution comprehensive sex ed supporters not to grow complacent. VIDEO: Comprehensive Sex Ed vs. Abstinence-Only

"It is far from the end game," says Bill Smith, the Vice President of Public Policy at SIECUS, but "we are capitalizing on this momentum and using it to advance comprehensive sex education. Specifically in Washington, it is SIECUS' top priority to establish the first-ever federal funding dedicated to comprehensive sex education and our state work is similarly focused." 

James Wagoner, the President of Advocates For Youth, concurs, pointing out recent public opinion victories (most recently, the McCain campaign's failure at using comprehensive sex education to scare the public), but notes that even if abstinence-only funding is cut, that doesn't necessarily mean we'll see the funding moved into comprehensive sex education.  Banking on a Democratic Congress might be a mistake, he argues, pointing out that past resistance from some House Democrats has to be overcome to achieve the comprehensive sex education goals.   

Indeed, the real danger might not be that abstinence-only continues, but that it fails and nothing comprehensive would replace it, which Wagoner points out would do nothing to change our high teenager pregnancy and STD rates.  So how should sexual and reproductive health activists capitalize on the momentum and push for a genuine, evidence-based, reality-oriented federal comprehensive sex education program that might have a real effect on public health outcomes? 

We need to argue from a position of strong values.  Right now, there's a myth that anti-choicers are the only ones who have values, and the mainstream media clings to this myth even in the face of self-evident silliness.  This Newsweek article is a good example: 

But spend time among the folks of east Texas, folks you'll find at the stadium on Friday night and the sanctuary on Sunday morning, and you start to understand why groups like Virginity Rules will not go quietly. This isn't really about sex. In the eyes of supporters, teaching abstinence to teenagers amounts to teaching marriage to future adults. 

Teaching marriage?  I live in Texas and can assure you that we don't have a plague of teenagers who are unaware of the existence of marriage, so I fail to understand how you "teach" it. Presumably, reporter Laura Beil means teaching young people to value marriage or to have good marriages.  In fact, Beil seems to think that comprehensive sex education ignores marriage, relationships, and values altogether.

The vast majority of public-health experts, however, seldom discuss sex education and marriage in the same sentence. They gauge success by pregnancies prevented, infections not contracted, and kids who enter adulthood with a healthy view of sexuality. The public-health community views a wait-until-marriage message as blind to the world most teens inhabit.

It's true that public health advocates do tend to hold the very mainstream opinion that marrying very young before you've seen much of the world isn't a smart thing to teach kids, but not because we're cold, clinical people obsessed with science over values, as Beil implies. (Even though it's a statistical reality that the younger you marry, the likelier you are to divorce.) As Wagoner explains, comprehensive sex education is about teaching kids about responsibility and conducting sexual relationships in healthy ways, which is hardly anti-marriage.  "Good, solid, healthy relationships are the foundation of good, healthy marriages," he argues.   

Not only do comprehensive sex education proponents value responsibility and healthy relationships, I'd add, but we also value maturity.  As the Newsweek article demonstrates, abstinence-only proponents argue the best marriages are made when the participants have the least amount experience and knowledge about maintaining sexual relationships, a belief rooted firmly not in the world of adults, but in children's stories. 

[The beauty queens] were, each one, card-carrying virgins, declaring, "We Are Waiting for Our Prince Charming." 

In that, you really see the difference in worldviews.  Abstinence-only is about telling teenage girls to hold out for a character that only exists in fiction.  Comprehensive sex education is about understanding that people have relationships in the real world, and those relationships shouldn't be devalued because they aren't in storybooks or animated by Disney.