Comprehensive sexuality education programs actually promote sexual promiscuity among young people. Abstinence is the only 100% successful method for preventing pregnancy and STIs, and abstinence-only-before-marriage education programs should therefore receive 100% of our resources.
Who’s Saying It?:
Focus on the Family (Throckmorton report), CWA, PRI, HLI
Comprehensive sexuality education programs actually promote sexual promiscuity among young people. Abstinence is the only 100% successful method for preventing pregnancy and STIs, and abstinence-only-before-marriage education programs should therefore receive 100% of our resources.
The Society for Adolescent Medicine states "We believe that current federal abstinence-only-until-marriage policy is ethically problematic, as it excludes accurate information about contraception, misinforms by overemphasizing or misstating the risks of contraception, and fails to require the use of scientifically accurate information while promoting approaches of questionable value."
There is no evidence that abstinence-only education is effective. Furthermore, these programs have been shown to rely on and promote misinformation in many cases.
California teens in abstinence-only programs were just as likely as their peers in other programs to become pregnant-California terminated those programs in 1996 after discovering these results. Other states have rejected federal funding for these programs for a range of reasons.
Advocates for Youth Report: "Youth who receive this kind of (comprehensive) education are more likely to initiate sexual activity later in life and use protection correctly and consistently when they do become sexually active..."
"Teens' participation in seven sexual behaviors - including vaginal intercourse - increased after they finished (a Florida abstinence-only) program," according to a Florida State University report.
80% of the reduction in teen pregnancy since 1991 is attributed to increased use of contraceptives, which are part of "comprehensive" education programs.
Of parents surveyed whose children had been through sexuality education classes in school, 93% believed that those classes were helpful to their children.
This issue has a lot to do with fundamentalist ideology: Evangelical or "born-again" Christians were three times more likely than their peers to say that sexuality education should not be taught in schools, and nearly 49% of them (vs. 21% of their peers) believed that government should fund abstinence-only education.
Relevant Links:
Graph: Drop in teen pregnancy rates preceded abstinence-only funding
Major medical associations, including the IOM and the American Medical Association, support comprehensive sexuality education.
Major government review revealing inaccuracies in abstinence-only education curricula.
