Report On Failure Of Abstinence-Only Education

There is a rule in politics that whenever you have a bit of news to hand out that makes you look bad, you wait until Friday night to release it. That way, it won't make it into the evening news, and nobody really watches news on Saturday... and hopefully by Sunday morning it will be forgotten about.

So what news did the White House release this past Friday evening? It was the big Congressional report on how well President Bush's $175 million-per-year sex education program is working. That's the one where, when sex-ed teachers are asked by a student to talk about condoms, those teachers are required to respond, "I'm sorry, I don't have any information on that subject."

The study found that students who attended abstinence-only education classes were equally likely to have sex (i.e. ignore the abstinence-only message) as compared to students who did not attend abstinence-only education. Surprisingly, it was found that students who were given abstinence-only education were ALSO equally as likely to practice safe sex as those students who did not receive the abstinence-only education.

Since abstinence-only education expressly avoids any discussion of safe sex practices, this means that not only were the students unaffected by the abstinence-only message of their sex education, but were going out on their own and obtaining the safe-sex information that their sex-ed class failed to give them.

So therefore, the abstinence-only education is a double failure: Not only does abstinence-only education not keep kids out of each others pants, but it apparently also prompts students to go and learn about safe sex. (Well... whether a goal of abstinence-only education is to keep children from learning about safe sex is open to debate. It doesn't discuss safe sex when other curricula do. You can decide whether "not educating someone" on a subject is the same as "stopping someone from learning about" a subject.)

Anyway: Among populations of teenagers, abstinence-only education is worth EXACTLY nothing in terms of the behaviors of those who receive it versus those who do not.