The Truth about Abstinence Education: What Obama and Pelosi Don’t Want You to Know

Robert Rector / February 03, 2010

Yesterday, a new study was released showing that abstinence education programs were effective in reducing teen sexual activity while conventional safe sex programs had no positive effects. Ironically, this finding comes at a time when President Obama and the Pelosi/Reid Congress have abolished all federal funding for abstinence and created a new funding stream to promote so-called “comprehensive” sex education. In order to understand this issue, it is important to dispel common myths about abstinence education and sex ed in general.

Myth: Abstinence Programs Don’t Work. The newly released study (which appeared in the February 2010 Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, published by the American Medical Association) was far from the first demonstrating the effectiveness of abstinence education. Prior to the current study, there had been 15 scientific evaluations of abstinence education, 11 of which had shown that abstinence programs were effective in reducing sexual activity. (See this 2008 Heritage paper for a review of these earlier studies.) However, before this week, the mainstream media had simply ignored the abundant evidence in favor of abstinence.

Myth: Under the Bush administration, the federal government funded only abstinence education. In fact, a funding analysis by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services shows that, in recent years, the federal government spent four dollars on condom education and distribution for teens for every dollar spent on abstinence. Obama and Pelosi have now abolished all federal funding for abstinence. The left wing advocates who currently run Congress do not want a balance between abstinence and safe sex; they want “safe sex” to be the only message available to young people. (more…)