Bush pushes sexual abstinence for teens

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Half a dozen 13-year-old boys munch pizza and slurp soda as they watch a video on how to resist peer pressure.

Afterwards, a counselor asks them how they might be able to counteract social pressure to engage in sexual activity. But most of the boys aren’t listening. Even after one of them is ejected from the Maryland classroom, they push and shove, make rude noises and insult the counselor and each other. Eventually, the session wraps up without any real discussion.

Welcome to sexual abstinence-only education in 2005.

In the past five years, President George W. Bush has more than doubled funding for such programs, which teach that abstinence from sexual activity until marriage is the only sure way to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and other health problems.

In his fiscal year 2006 budget unveiled last month, which drastically slashed spending on hundreds of other social programs, Bush proposed increasing funding for abstinence by $39 million to $206 million, rising to $270 million by 2008.

Yet critics say there is no evidence these programs have any effect on reducing teenage sexual activity and often offer misleading or outrightly false information about reproductive health that increases the risks of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

“Bush may be sincere but he is also pandering to his political base and paying more attention to the ideology than the facts,” said Michael McGee, vice president for education for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which calls abstinence-only education “one of the religious right’s greatest challenges to the nation’s sexual health.”

McGee said the abstinence-only movement had had a chilling effect on U.S. classrooms, forcing teachers to stop mentioning contraception in health classes even when the curriculum requires them to do so.

“It only takes one parent complaining to ruin it for the entire school. We’ve seen it in community after community. Schools want at all costs to avoid controversy,” he said.

Teen pregnancy rates in the United States have been falling in recent years, dropping 28 percent between 1990 and 2000, but remain more than twice as high as in most European nations.

FAVORABLE TRENDS

“Look at the trends if you want to see whether abstinence education works,” said Jimmy Hester, coordinator of True Love Waits, sponsored by Lifeway Christian Resources, a Nashville-based publishing group.

“Our program started 11 years ago out of grassroots concern that students were only hearing safe sex messages and didn’t even realize that abstinence was an option,” he said.

Including information about contraception and safe sex just “waters down the message,” he said.

Critics say a substantial increase in contraceptive use by sexually active teens as well as a decline in sexual activity among adolescents lie behind the statistics.

And they say that numerous studies of abstinence programs have failed to find any measurable impact. In one of the latest, conducted by researchers in Bush’s home state of Texas and released last month, teenagers in 29 high schools became increasingly sexually active after taking such courses, mirroring overall state trends.

“The jury is still out, but most of what we’ve discovered shows there’s no evidence the large amount of money we’re spending is having an effect,” said Buzz Pruitt of Texas A&M University, who directed the study.

Another study of the teaching materials used by abstinence programs prepared for California Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman in December found that 80 percent of the curricula examined contained false, misleading or distorted information.

Commonly, they taught that condoms were ineffective in preventing sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy and contained false information about the risks of abortion as well as blatantly sexist messages, the report said.

In Pennsylvania, the state stopped funding abstinence programs after seeing a study that showed they were not working, but the federal government increased its funding to fill the void, said state health department spokesman Richard McGarvey.

In Maryland, the programs are administered exclusively as voluntary after-school activities. In Frederick County, north of Washington, officials have concentrated on recruiting 13-and 14-year-old boys for twice-weekly sessions.

“We take them bowling and swimming but they also do community service projects as well as classroom sessions,” said Beth Mowrey who directs the “Guys Only” program for the Frederick County Health Department.

“We want kids to delay the initiation of sexual intercourse and to increase parent-child communication on sexuality, drugs, alcohol and responsible decision-making,” she said.

When boys in the class at New Market were asked why they signed up, most said it was to have fun and get free food. 

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