Let’s Pledge to Stop Being Stupid About Teen Sex..."Our national investment in abstinence-only may not be a scam on the scale of Bernie Madoff. But this industry has had standards for truth as loose as some mortgage lenders"
Ic
SUV. All in all, abstinence-only education has become emblematic of
the rule of ideology over science."
Let’s Pledge to Stop Being Stupid About Teen Sex
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081231_ellen_goodman_jan_1/
Jan 1, 2009
I hate to bring this up right now when the ink is barely dry on
your New Year’s resolution. But if history is any guide, you are
likely to fall off the assorted wagons to which you are currently
lashed.
I don’t say this to disparage your willpower. Hang onto that
celery stick for dear life. And even if you stop doing those stomach
crunches and start sneaking out for a smoke, at least you can comfort
yourself with fond memories of your moment of resolution.
Compare that to the statistic in the newest research about teens
who pledge sexual abstinence. The majority not only break the pledge,
they forget they ever made it.
This study of teens and pledges comes from Johns Hopkins
researcher Janet Rosenbaum, who took a rigorous look at nearly 1,000
students. She compared teens who took a pledge of abstinence with
teens of similar backgrounds and beliefs who didn’t. She found
absolutely no difference in their sexual behavior, or the age at which
they began having sex, or the number of their partners.
In fact, the only difference—aside from apparent memory impairment—
was that the group that promised to remain abstinent was significantly
less likely to use birth control, especially condoms, when they did
have sex. The lesson many students seemed to retain from their
abstinence-only program was a negative and inaccurate view of
contraception.
This is not just a primer on the capacity for teenage denial or
the inner workings of adolescent neurobiology. What makes this study
important is simply this: “Virginity pledges” are one of the ways that
government officials measure whether abstinence-only education is
“working.” They count the pledges as proof that teens will abstain. It
turns out that this is like counting New Year’s resolutions as proof
that you lost 10 pounds.
We have been here before. And before that. And before that.
When he was running for president, George W. Bush promised, “My
administration will elevate abstinence education from an afterthought
to an urgent goal.” Over the last eight years, a cottage industry of
“abstinence-only-until-marriage” purveyors became a McMansion
industry. Funding increased from $73 million a year in 2001 to $204
million in 2008. That’s a grand total of $1.5 billion in federal money
for an ideology in search of a methodology. And half the states
refused funds to pay for sex miseducation.
By now, there’s an archive of research showing that the binge was
a bust. Programs mandated to teach only “the social, psychological and
health gains (of) abstaining from sexual activity” and to warn of the
dangers of having sex have been awarded failing grades for truth and
effectiveness. As Rosenbaum says, “Abstinence-only education is
required to give inaccurate information. Teens are savvy consumers of
information and know what they are getting.”
Our national investment in abstinence-only may not be a scam on
the scale of Bernie Madoff. But this industry has had standards for
truth as loose as some mortgage lenders. It manufactures a product as
ill suited to the environment as the SUV. All in all, abstinence-only
education has become emblematic of the rule of ideology over science.
The sorry part is that sex education got caught in the culture
wars. It’s been framed, says Bill Albert of the National Campaign to
Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, as a battle between “those who
wanted virginity pledges and those who wanted to hand out condoms to
14-year-olds.”
Meanwhile, six in 10 teens have sex before they leave high school
and 730,000 teenage girls will get pregnant this year. We see them
everywhere from “Juno” to Juneau—or to be more accurate, Anchorage,
where Sarah Palin, advocate of abstinence-only education just became
an unplanned grandparent.
What the overwhelming majority of protective parents actually want
is not a political battle. They want teens to delay sex and to have
honest information about sexuality, including contraception. The
programs that work best combine those lessons.
Soon Congress and the new administration will be asked to ante up
again for abstinence-only programs. As Cecile Richards of Planned
Parenthood says, abstinence-only education was “an experiment gone
awry. We spent $1.5 billion and can’t point to a single study that
says this helps. If it doesn’t help, why fund it?”
Teens are not the only masters of denial. But we are finally
stepping back from the culture wars. We are, with luck, returning to
something that used to be redundant—evidence-based science. That’s a
pledge worth signing ... and remembering.
Ellen Goodman