Not Even Texas is Willing to Admit Abstinence-Only Works
Texas currently ranks at third place for the highest teen birth rate in the country and they have the highest rate of repeat teen births. Coincidentally, Texas leads the entire country in the amount of government money spent on abstinence-only education. Luckily for the teens of Texas, some school districts in the state are shifting away from abstinence-only, admitting that it isn’t working.
Roy Knight, Lufkin Independent School District superintendent said, “Our data says that what we’re doing isn’t working, and our community is ready for us to do something different.” He also stated that the decision to go a different route as far as sex education goes was “absolutely driven” by a teen pregnancy rate that is higher than the state average.
Currently across the country, one in four teenage girls have a sexually transmitted infection and 30% of US girls become pregnant before the age of 20. Medical experts from the American Public Health Association and US Institution of Medicine have testified that scientific studies have not found that abstinence-only teaching works to cut pregnancy rates, sexually transmitted infection rates or the age when sexual activity begins.
While abstinence-only education tells teens that abstaining from sex and sexual activity is the safest choice for teens, we also know that it includes very little other than that sentiment, including extremely limited information about contraceptives and condoms and downplays their effectiveness. Texas school districts are planning to put an “abstinence-plus” sex education curriculum in place which does include abstinence in the material, but also stresses the importance of using protection if teens are sexually active.
Abstinence-plus education fits the Obama administration’s effort to shift dollars from abstinence promotion to strategies aimed at lowering teen pregnancies. Thankfully the Obama administration has been adamant of ending abstinence-only and we have all seen that abstinence-only robs teens of the information that they have a right to have. The federal abstinence program, known as Title V, expired on June 30 and an even larger program, Community Based Abstinence Education, is expected to cease after 2010. Both of these programs have sent about $14 million every year to Texas, most in the form of federal grants to nonprofit groups that contract with school districts. Because these groups will soon not exist at all (hooray!) it is wise to assume that school districts are putting abstinence-plus in place because their funding has dried up for abstinence-only and the reason why funds have dried up for abstinence-only is because it is an insult to teens everywhere.
Luckily, 17 of the 50 states have refused to accept any federal funding for abstinence-only education and I am so glad that I can report that many Texas school districts have realized that telling teens not to have sex will actually sway teens to abstain.
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